Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News back in 2005. Martin started his career as a tech support representative at a large German financial corporation which he used to finance his college education in English, Information Technology and History.
He quit college and his job when Ghacks began to attract a large enough readership. He made the decision to become a full time blogger and webmaster, and has not looked back since.
Martin is interested in all things tech. His primary focus is on desktop operating systems, web browsers, Internet services, and privacy related topics.
He published the book The Complete Windows 10 Privacy Guide: Windows 10 Fall Creators Update version in 2017. Martin writes a weekly column for fellow tech site Betanews as well.
You can reach Martin on Facebook or on Twitter. Please use the contact form at the bottom of the page to contact the author directly.
Martin has been quoted or mentioned in many major online and print publications, including Forbes, Lifehacker.com, ComputerWorld, LinkedIn, Reddit, Betanews.com, Bleeping Computer, TechCrunch, PC World, Tom's Hardware, Slashdot, Hacker News, The Register, and more.
Martin's articles on Ghacks
If you thought that the HD war was over with the switch of Warner Studios from supporting both HD formats to just Blu-Ray then you might want to observe the market a little bit longer. The effect that Warner has left the HD DVD supporters will not be visible to consumers later this year when the contract expires (May 2008). From then on Warner will only release movies on DVD and Blu-Ray.
The Recent Documents are a comfort function in Office 2007 products such as Word 2007 or Excel 2007 that displays the last 17 documents that you have opened in the applications. You can open that menu when you click on the big - some say huge - Office icon button on the top left corner of the screen.
I remember that several tweaking programs that emerged after the release of Windows XP changed the EnablePrefetcher in the Registry which supposedly should speed up application load time. I also read about that tip in many forums and just recently in a computer magazine that published the tip to change the EnablePrefetcher value to 4-6 to speed up the system.
I'm currently still using my old Microsoft Xbox as my media center and it's working fine so far but I do have thoughts about the future. The Xbox will not last forever and the new Xbox 360 cannot be modified to do the same yet. One alternative that I investigated was building a computer for this purpose and I'm almost sure that I would use the Geexbox Linux distribution as the operating system.
Not enough server storage is available to process this command is a message that you can receive when you try to access a shared resource on a network. The Event ID: 2011 may also be written referring to the configuration parameter IRPStackSize. If the IRPStackSize is not present in the Registry the default value which may not be large enough for the server service to administer shared folders on some of the physical drives.
When I first reviewed Miro it was still known as the Democracy Player; a lot has changed since then and I decided to take a second look at Miro. The first question that I was asking myself was how I could classify Miro. Is it a video player, a videocast player, a way to play videos from video portals ? It's actually all of this although I would not use it for everything that I have just mentioned.
Not only are there hundreds of standard and common extensions we've already learned to recognize by heart by seeing them every day, there are also many specific and rare extensions we come across from time to time because as a matter of fact, every programmer can create extensions for his purposes. So how do we handle that?
Giveaways, more giveaways and even more giveaways. Seems we can expect more free software giveaways this year. It's Avira again with a promotion to test the AntiVir PersonalEdition Premium for six months with no obligations whatsoever. All you have to do is fill out a small form and they will send you a working serial number that is valid for the next six months.
Would you use a program that would reduce the memory usage of Firefox to 100-200 Kilobyte ? I have no idea how the Firefox Ultimate Optimizer is reducing the memory usage to this amount but the task manager is verifying the reduction. Firefox has been using roughly 40 Megabytes of RAM whenever I started it and one homepage was loaded.
The album Ever Changing Times by Steve Lukather got a 2.2 out of 10 over at Komodo Rock which is one of the lowest scores ever. The reason why the album got that bad rating ? No, it's not the music, the lyrics, the artwork. It's a new form of protection to avoid leaks of the album to the Internet.
In the article entitled Confessions: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did at CES Brian Lam describes how they used a device called TV-B-Gone to turn off television screens at this years CES. They even created a video that is available at their website showing what they did. They did turn off televisions during at least one press conference and numerous presentations and did publish the video on their website.
I guess ourTunes is a very popular application in Universities and IT departments. It basically lets you download songs from other peoples iTunes if they are in the same network and share their itunes library. I'm not in a network and don't use iTunes at all so I can't test how effective this method is compared to using ftp, network browsing or local copies but I guess some will like it because it is easy to use.
Richard from Windows Observer send me a download link for Xobni, a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that extends the functionality tremendously. I'm not using Microsoft Outlook anymore since I started using Thunderbird and quit my day job where they forced me to use it. I still think that this an interesting plugin that should be mentioned here at Ghacks.
I'm looking for a software that offers an easy way to write down notes on my desktop. I do not need a fancy tool with lots of options, just something basic that is available immediately. I used to write down notes in text documents but my desktop soon got cluttered with lots of text documents containing notes and it was obviously not the perfect method.
If you want to find out which programs have established an Internet connection on your system you can use the software Procx for that. Procx is a process and module manager much […]
Trend Micro have published another excellent article on their malware blog entitled A Tangled Web ... of Malware. It describes how hackers use popular media websites to spread malware and how their […]
Security Expert Bruce Schneier wrote a commentary on Wired yesterday where he admitted that he was using an Open Wi-Fi and that he could not see what was wrong with doing so. He refused to accept security reasons because he said that the computer had to be secured as well and that an Open Wi-Fi would essentially be the same as using Wi-Fi on airports or Internet cafes.
I would like to write about a subject that I have been investigating lately. I'm talking about links in general and how they should look like and how they should not look like. This is solely from a webmasters point of view so forgive me that I'm not taking the users into account here. Links play a important role in search engine rankings, they are probably the most deciding factor when it comes to search engine rankings.
SAM ? What's that again ? SAM is the Security Account Manager and part of the Windows Registry. Unfortunately though it is not possible to access that part of the Registry directly even if you are logged in as an administrator. It is however possible to analyze the file sam.bak which can be found in the directory system32/config/ of your Windows installation.
Did you know that it is possible to upload pictures from your Nokia N series phone to your Flickr account ? A lot of Nokia N series mobile phones are supported and many have the Flickr application build in. Among the supported phones are the N73 editions, the N80, N93 and the N95.
If you have the intention to get a Flickr Pro account you might find the following deal interesting that gives you three extra months for no additional charge. A one year Flickr pro account costs $24.95 and gives you unlimited storage, uploads, bandwidth, sets, ad free browsing and permanent archiving of high quality images.
Companies release new DVD writers all the time that have new functions and work better with certain type of media. They neglect DVD writers that they have produced before and it is quite common that those DVD writers will have problems with certain blank DVDs that have been newly produced.
It seems that more and more specialized websites appear that list videos from sites such as Youtube and Google Video. At the beginning websites that would post lists of tv shows and movies were the most common ones and they are still very popular. Other websites emerge now that only list anime, sports or music videos.
A new version of Revo Uninstaller was released this week and I decided to install it again to check on the progress of the application. Revo Uninstaller is a program uninstaller that has several interesting features that I mentioned only briefly in my last article which was published a while ago. It's main task is a replacement for the Windows uninstaller which is slow and careless when it comes to uninstalling applications.
You might have heard that Mozilla launched a new viral campaign in a fight against boredom and Internet Explorer of course. They did produce a music video, several websites and it seems to be gaining momentum rapidly.
Microsoft is releasing collected security patches each month for their Windows operating systems. I'm not a fan of this approach because I would feel safer and securer if they would release patches as soon as they would be ready to be released which would secure computers and reduce the time that someone could exploit these security vulnerabilities.
Fancast is a service by the cable provider Comcast who streams dozens of popular tv shows from Battlestar Galactica to The Office and The Unit free on their website. The service is available to viewers with a US IP only which means that everyone else will not be able to view the tv shows unless they hide their IP with a service like Hotspot Shield.
Windows has no option to change the large desktop icons to small ones like the option that is available for folder icons. I was searching for a software called SetShellView which a friend recommended and I found out that this software was only working in Windows 2000. It allowed the user to change the large desktop icons to small icons and even to list views.
Finally we are seeing the long awaited progress in the Solid State Drives market. Ridata was the first company to announce three new 2.5" SATA Solid State Drives in 32-, 64-, and 128GB capacities that have read speeds of up to 170 MB / per second and write speeds of up to 105 MB / per second.
I think we can all agree on the fact that multi-monitor support in Windows is not what it could be and that Microsoft does not seem to put lots of efforts into changing this status any time soon. We have to rely on third party tools to add the functions and features that we demand from a multi-monitor environment and Multi-monitor taskbar is one of those applications.
If you do not want to download music from Bittorrent you now have an alternative that might suite you better. You can use the Bitlet Bittorrent Applet to stream the music contained in the torrent to your computer. The applet phrase hints that Java - not Javascript - is required to stream the music from torrent files to your computer.
Notepad is fast and that is probably the only good thing that I can say about the software that ships with Windows. It has a file size limitation and a lot of other limitations as well. Many users prefer to use so called Notepad replacements that do not have the limitations and I would like to introduce one that is called Akelpad.
Microsoft has released a Knowledgebase article that explains how users can disable UAC, that is the User Account Control, for selected applications in Windows Vista. This solution requires an administrator account and the Application Compatibility Toolkit which can be downloaded from Microsoft directly.
I'm not sure if I'm the only one who is experiencing display problems on the Netvibes website using the latest Firefox browser. What's happening is that whenever I hover my mouse over an entry the appearing options like edit and collapse look totally misplaced. It's hard to describe and I did create a screenshot so that you can take a look at it by yourself.
Adblock Plus is probably one of the most popular Firefox extensions of all time. It blocks almost any advertisement on the Internet and is highly effective. Users can add filters to Adblock Plus that whitelist those websites which means that ads on those websites will be shown. This is excellent for webmasters who want to make sure that their websites are displaying the correct ads and visitors who want to give something back to a website that they really like.
Wikia Search is the new project by Jimmy Wales who created Wikipedia. Instead of using an algorithmic approach it combines that approach with user feedback to provide everyone with better search results. The theory sounds nice, let users week out the spam and fake websites like Made for Adsense sites and websites with no content.
Schools, libraries and even colleges like to restrict access to their public computers and some do not even have a link to an Internet browser although they might be connected to the net normally. This is done to get rid of those users who occupy a computer to chat on the Internet while its main purpose is to do something else, e.g. research books.
Did you recently purchase a DVD in store ? If so you must have noticed this wonderful reminder at the beginning that can't be skipped that downloading pirated films is stealing and a crime. I recently bought 24 season 4 on DVD which comes on seven DVDs and contains all the 24 episodes of this season.
The problem that Thunderbird is always selecting the next message in line after deleting or moving the previous one has bothered me for some time. It happened more than once that a spam mail was selected and read that way which I did not want to happen obviously.
Firefox Mastery published a nice article about the Firefox add-on Controle de Scripts which lets the user control Javascript events in Firefox. Instead of just disabling Javascript (default Firefox without add-ons), or enabling it on a per-site basis (NoScript) you can configure and control specific Javascripts events.
