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
Lets say your computer has limited resources and you can only use five Firefox add-ons when browsing the Internet. Tell me, which would you choose and why. I'm currently cutting down on the Firefox extensions that I'm actively using because I felt that Firefox was using to much memory when I started it without opening a website at all.
Not every user has the luxury of a Internet flatrate and I personally know a few who are still using time or data related accounts. I experienced this as well when I used my mobile phone to connect to the Internet during a holiday. Every byte counts sometimes and it is always a good idea to monitor the bandwidth that you are using in that time.
If you want a breakdown of the music that you favor you can use a software called WTF!? Music Info which analyzes a directory that contains music and displays a chart sorting the music by genre, artist or year. The application was designed for the Donation Coder Nany 2008 challenge and you can find additional software on the official website.
The Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 3 has been released a bit more than a month ago and is already beginning to cause problems for several users who applied the Service Pack. I would think that a Service Pack adds functionality and fixes security vulnerabilities. This one apparently blocks old file formats from being loaded by Microsoft Office applications.
A friend of mine called me just recently and told me that Windows XP would take a long time before shutting the computer down. He sometimes waited for longer than a minute before everything was turned off. Since I was not able to visit him in the next time I told him about a software that could probably help reduce the Windows XP shutdown time.
I recently came across a download that included several cbr files and I had to put my memory to the test to remember how I would be able to view them. CBR files are Comic Book Archive files that also come as cbz and cbt files. They are actually archives, like rar, zip or tar, that have been renamed to cbr. This has the advantage that a comic book can be distributed in one file that includes all the pages as images.
I like shoes made by Etnies who happen to have a online store where you can create your own shoe. Unfortunately though they only ship to the United States which is why I'm looking for someone who would be so kind to order a pair of custom made shoes for me and send them to my location in Germany afterwards.
I do not like Codec packages. You may ask why that is the case and my answer would be that they tend to install more than is needed to run the videos on your computer. There are also lots of fake codec packages out there that install viruses and trojans on your system.
Am I the only one that is thinking that putting Ads into Adobe PDF documents is not going to be that successful ? Putting contextual ads next to content in PDF documents is going to fail and here is why. Users are not used to ads in documents like PDF or Doc and they will have a hard time convincing users and advertisers to try this new ad form.
So, what do we make of this ? The rumor is that Apple is launching a record label together with Jay-Z according to BSG who say they have confirmed it from a high-up person attached to Jay-Z. We do not have many details as of yet but we can make some assumptions. The deal makes perfectly sense if you consider that Apple already has a very popular distribution model in place which would profit the most from artists that sign under the new label.
Youtube is a well established video portal with the huge advantage that content is added every second by its visitors. Most Internet users probably do not know that Microsoft has its own video portal called MSN Video. That is probably the greatest weakness of MSN Video that hardly anyone knows about it and that this has direct impact on the amount of available videos.
Vista4Experts is a Microsoft Windows Vista tweaker that is aimed at expert users who can live without most of the functions that have been introduced in Vista. It currently features 21 settings that can either be enabled or disabled with a double-click.
I once had to add a image into a Word document that had a black background which looked awful when printing the document. Microsoft Word comes with a few basic possibilities to alter graphics that are added which includes changing colors of the image and defining a transparent color for the image.
A picture comparing Apple's iPhone with the iPhone Nano which is supposed to come out in October 2008 was published on Flickr. The iPhone Nano, as usual, will be smaller than it's first generation predecessor but also cheaper retailing for a price of $300 or less.
Where do you go if you have a problem with Firefox ? I normally research the problem and try to find a solution for it on my own. There is one more possibility that the Mozilla team recently has established and that is Firefox Live Chat Support. You can get into contact with a volunteer who is trying to help you solve the problem that you are experiencing.
Interesting article over there at the Download Squad where they list the 5 most annoying programs. They call it Elephantwear, a very fitting description for programs that make your feel like your computer is not that fast anymore even if it is state of the art. Their top 5 consists of Adobe Reader, Apple's iTunes, Real Player, Internet Explorer and Outlook.
Modern video cards come in two flavors. The noisy ones that have lots of horsepower and the silent ones that trade some of the horsepower for a reduced noise level. This is currently changing with the release of the Nvidia Geforce 8600GT but most users have an older video card in their computer.
Ars Technica are reporting that CD sales this Christmas, that is the period between Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve, are down 20% compared to last year which means that 21.4 million CDs have been sold less than the previous year. This looks serious but is it ? We have to take a look at overall earnings to make a fair judgment.
I hope you all had a nice evening yesterday. I would like to take the opportunity and preview the things to come in 2008. 2007 was an astonishing year for Ghacks and I have great plans so that 2008 will exceed the last year in all terms. You can expect roughly 1500 new posts this year written by me which should keep you up to date with all the latest trends, programs, services and hacks that you can imagine.
System Restore is a function in Windows operating systems since Windows ME that creates so called Restore Points so that the user can bring his system back to a previous state in time. This is important when changes to the system or an attack make the system unresponsive in any way. There is however the danger that malicious files are saved during that process as well which means that they would be restored when the user wanted to revert the system to a previous state.
Microsoft competes with Google in many areas but has still chosen to create a video channel on Youtube to promote Microsoft products. While this seems odd it could be an effort to reach potential customers in enemy territory. What most websites reporting about the ads are reporting is that the PR guys decided to leave the comment function activated which invites many comments that are criticizing Microsoft.
I use the keyboard shortcut CTRL + F regularly to search for phrases in websites with lots of content to be able to find what I'm looking for faster. Some webmasters still seem to think that putting as much content on one page is the way to go if you want to present your information.
Tiny Url links are a great way to shorten long urls and hide the destination of the link at the same time. I read several PC magazines that use Tiny Url to print urls in their magazine. There is however a certain danger involved because the user does not see where a link is really leading to. It could very well be that someone is posting tiny url links on trusted websites to fool users into visiting those websites.
Xtra Windows Stability is an interesting piece of software that was mentioned in Shellcity's top 25 software of the year series. The product was especially designed to increase Windows stability by forcing important subsystems of Windows into separate processes.
If you have one of the newer iPods with 8GB+ you might want to consider putting all the information of Wikipedia on it for fast reference. I personally think that this is an excellent idea if you regularly visit Wikipedia to research information but do not have Internet connection all the time. This could also be useful on your holiday trip if you want to quickly lookup information about a place, location or historical fact.
Today I had a problem playing a Region 2 DVD on my Region 1 DVD drive connected to a PC running Windows. I was asked to change the Region of my DVD […]
Most video portals on the Internet use the flv - that's Flash Video - format to stream videos to their users. While Flash Video has several advantages over many other video formats when it comes to streaming it on a website it does have some severe disadvantages when it comes to playing those videos on a computer and even more so on a DVD player.
Xinorbis is a interesting hard disk analyzer that compiles heaps of information about files on the hard drive and presents the results in easy to understand manner using text and charts. The analysis takes a while to complete because all files are scanned on the hard drive that you select.
Hundreds of websites have been prepared or compromised to take advantage of the Benazir Bhutto Assassination in Pakistan. Users searching for news on the assassination using search engines like Google or Yahoo might land on a website that has been specially prepared to download Javascript code that in turn downloads additional malicious software to the host PC.
The following is a nice trick that I learned in a webmaster forum. I thought it would be nice to describe it to my readers as well because you can have some fun with it. It allows you to manipulate all elements of a website. You could for instance create number one positions on Google, add your own products to Amazon or write a cover story at CNN.
This is already the third article in the Five Quick Windows Tips series of articles which concentrate on quick and easy to adapt tips that take only a few seconds to read and apply. Most tips concentrate on increasing productivity but some also deal with security related issues for example.
The Rubicon Project is yet another service like Pubmatic that tries to optimize your ad inventory on your website. They do this by testing different kinds of ads from different advertising companies in the ad spots on your website which has the result that ads generating maximum profits are displayed after a while.
Pediaphon is a text to speech script that generates a mp3 from any Wikipedia article that you point it to. The article is then processed and a mp3 is created where a robotic voice will read the article for you. The voice is understandable but you recognize that it is not a human reading the article. If that does not bother you Pediaphon is a great application.
I discovered an interesting article at Lifehacker who themselves got it from Make Use Of. The article described a way to speed up the process before the download begins in Firefox. Instead of right-clicking the file and selecting Save As from the menu the author suggested to drag and drop the download link to the Download icon which would start the download immediately.
I like to take a glimpse at future technologies so that I can see which technology changes we can expect in the next few years. This one is amazing. It has been taken right out of a Japanese news show showing how a characters appearance is changed in real time. Character is probably not the right word because what I really mean is that the real time image of a human is taken and altered in a way that offers several new interesting prospects.
When I was only using my desktop computer I was a little bit puzzled why I would need Hardware Profiles at all. It did not make much sense to disable hardware that was properly installed on my computer. Now, that I own a notebook for some time I understand why this can make sense under certain circumstances.
Whenever I open the Task Manager I see the processes csrss.exe, smss.exe and lsass.exe sitting there. I guess the same can be said for your Windows where those processes are most likely appearing as well. So, what are these processes actually doing and are they required to run whenever Windows starts ?
Let me narrate a story to you. A story of someone who has an Gmail account and a domain registered to his name. This someone checks his Gmail account regularly and visits other sites afterwards. It is so convenient to stay logged in at Gmail in case you want to check again. Maybe Gmail is open all the time in another tab for even further comfort.
System Explorer is a mix between Process Explorer and Autoruns from Sysinternals. It reveals many information related to running processes, services and tasks and gives insight into additional system related information such as loaded drivers, open connections and Internet Explorer Add-ons like Browser Helper Objects.
The first article with five quick Windows tips was successful enough which made the decision to write another one easier for me. These tips are most of the time one-liners that can be applied in no time to your operating system.
