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
Email spam is so common these days that it has become a part of our live to wade through the spam to identify the real emails that have been sent to our mail account. It can be a challenge for the average user sometimes while IT-professionals and experienced users identify legit and fake emails at a glance .
One cold winter days you might find yourself hanging around the web, visiting the same boring sites every day and staring at your screen without any purpose and new inspiration. In that case, it would be the right time to get up and check what the world looks like from outside too (alright, maybe I'm not the right person to give such advice). Or if it's too cold to go out at the moment, you may be interested in these advisory lists providing links to websites that are special in a certain way.
If you ask computer users about the anti-spyware software that they have installed to protect their system they will most likely name Spybot Search and Destroy or Ad-Aware. Those are the most commonly used anti-spyware programs. Some would probably name Windows Defender from Microsoft or Spyware Terminator or some commercial products.
The software Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery was designed for distributed recovery of lost passwords providing hardware acceleration for NTLM password recovery using GeForce 8 video cards which speeds up the process by a factor of up to 25).
I'm not that fond of online virus scanners because they always need special file access privileges and scan your files which could be a privacy issue as well. Infected or Not from Panda Antivirus however catched my attention by providing interesting statistics about infected computers on a worldwide and country wide scale.
Docsyncer was mentioned on the Digital Inspiration blog as a service that automatically synced Microsoft documents such as doc and xls with the Google Docs web service. This can be incredible helpful if you do use Microsoft Office and Google Docs. This could for instance be the case if you upload your Word or Excel documents to Google Docs to be able to work with them on a different computer.
I bet you have never seen such a tempting Trojan before. The Trojan named Melissa Strip, identified as TROJ_CAPTCHAR.A by TrendMicro and Trj/RompeCaptchas.A by Panda, starts by asking the user if he wants to play a game where she (Melissa) will strip for the user if the enters the correct code.
If you are looking for a quick way to copy music from your Apple iPod to a computer you might find the software iPod Folder which is available for Windows and Mac more than suitable. Users can start the transfer of the music with just three clicks. The first click selects the iPod that is connected to the computer, the second click selects the destination folder on the computer and the third finally starts the transfer of the music.
I'm still puzzled as to why it took so long to add Divx and Xvid support to the Xbox 360 and wondered if Microsoft did not ask the users before they produced the Xbox 360 about the features that the users wanted to see. My old Xbox is playing all of those files without a problem and the main reason why I did not make the switch to the new Xbox 360 was, among other things, the non existent support for Xvid and Divx movies.
advantage of adding RAM is the fact that you it is relatively easy to add to your system. Takes less than a minute to replace.
The second choice really depends on what you do with your computer. If you are a gamer you might consider getting one of those new Geforce 8800 GT which start at $270 and make it possible to play Crysis and other high end games in high details. Again, check your computer to see if it supports AGP or PCI Express Video Cards before going out and buying one that does not fit.
Many Internet users tend to have a handful of passwords at the most that they use for every website that they signup for. Those passwords are normally weak passwords that can be easily remembered. The danger of this approach is that those users will most likely see a chain reaction of hacked accounts once one account gets hacked.
Apple iTunes has no way of detecting new music additions to your music folders which means that you have to add them from within iTunes manually to be able to play them in the software or sync them with your iPod music player.
It can happen that you end up with duplicate address book entries in Mozilla Thunderbird and wonder how you can remove them so that only one entry per contact is visible in the Thunderbird Address Book. The current Thunderbird address book is most likely fragmented or corrupted and the easiest way to fix that is to create a new Address Book and copy the contents of the old Address Book into the new one.
Microsoft is providing download versions of the Windows Server 2008 release candidate free of charge right from their website to anyone interested in downloading them. A product key can be requested as well which will make the product valid until April 7, 2008.
A reader send me an email last night asking if I had any information about the orbitnet.exe process that was started when Orbit Downloader was active. Zonealarm would describe the process as "P2P service of Orbit Downloader" and that seemed to have rang some alarm bells because P2P services are often used as spyware.
You might know that I'm looking for a PDA or similar device that will allow me to comfortably check and write emails, write blog posts and visit websites while on the road. I do have a Toshiba notebook but I don't like to use it on the road. It is fine in hotels and on conventions where I can use it stationary but it really is to big to work comfortably with while walking around.
Both iTunes and Winamp offer a way to share music with your friends although their implementation is rather limited. Apples iTunes software shares music only with users that are within the same network while Winamp Remote offers a way to listen to Winamp from a website.
Google Adsense offers webmasters a quick way to monetize their website without really thinking about niches and affiliates that work for your website. While the Adsense website offers a quick way of analyzing your revenue and some filters it does not really shine when it comes to generating reports that webmasters can use to analyze the revenue.
You might have cursed the developers of Notepad for instance if you ever tried to open a file in Notepad with a different extension than .txt. Notepad can only filter file lists for txt files or display all files. If you were looking for a php or htm file for instance you had to display all files in that folder and search for the file that you wanted to open.
Microsoft revealed some changes to their Windows Genuine Advantage protection scheme for Windows Vista which determines if the copy of Windows Vista is legit. A non validated Windows Vista operating system would reduce its functionality after 30 days and make only security updates available for that system.
I have discovered a very nice Firefox extension named Fission over at the Firefox Mastery website which deals with all things Firefox. Fission is a Firefox add-on that displays the loading progress of a website in the address bar of Firefox. It uses transparent colors to visualize the loading progress and I have to admit that I really love the way it looks and displays it.
Auto logon should not be configured if more than one user is working with a computer or if the computer is part of a local area network. A PC that is only used by one user could be configured to automatically log that user in when he boots his computer. I have auto logon enabled in Windows XP and really enjoy the faster boot speed.
My four year old nephew likes to play jigsaw puzzles and I also began teaching him computer basics. He already knows how to move the mouse, click and drag objects and install Linux on a computer. (just kidding about the last one). He does very well and I thought it would be nice to play some jigsaw puzzles with him on the computer so that he would get used to mouse movement and ways of interacting with the screen and game.
If you are looking for a quick way to create and publish a beautifully looking photo album you should take a look at Photo On Web. This software is ideal for those who want to create photo albums without having deeper knowledge of html and design. Users simply create a new album, add the photos that they want to see in it to it, choose a template from the 20 available that fits it nicely and click on publish to generate the photo album.
Are you living in a neighborhood with lots of Wlan activity ? You can check this if you do search for Wlans on your computer and find lots of them listed. It does not really matter if they use an encryption like WPA, WPA2 or WEP, as long as they are listed there they might interfere with your own Wlan channel which can be the cause for bad download rates and sudden disconnects.
Specialized mp3 search engines that let users download the mp3 songs found for free seem to appear by the dozen every week. Bee Mp3 is another one of those that copy the usability and interface of a search engine like Google but only let the user search for mp3 songs that can be downloaded from the web.
You can think whatever you want about the Apple iPhone but it surely gets more developer love than most other phones currently on the market. I spotted two incredible applications for the iPhone which might appeal to a lot of iPhone owners. The first software is called Mobile Scrobbler which connects the iPhone and iPod Touch with Last.fm.
I do not like the autocomplete function in Firefox because it is not flexible enough and compares urls only from the beginning. I sometimes happen to remember part of the title or url of the website but not the beginning of the url which means that I only could search through all urls that I have visited until I found the one that I wanted to visit again.
The Windows XP guest account is not only used to allow guests to login to Windows XP but also to authenticate the computer in peer to peer networks. Disabling the XP guest account is therefor only advised if you do not use file sharing, printer sharing or Internet connection sharing. Please note that file sharing refers to the build in Windows XP functionality and not applications like Bittorrent or Emule.
I have been experiencing the Error 69 in iTunes lately when syncing iPod. The full error message read "Attempting to copy to the disk failed. An unknown error occurred (-69)" which is not really that helpful if you ask me. I figured that this was some kind of transfer problem and decided to investigate it further.
After working in a normal job and blogging for the last two years I decided to make the big step and quit my day job and become a full time blogger. This is actually a huge step for me but I think I know all the positive and negative aspects of the decision I made two months ago.
My friend experienced a problem after installing a new hardware device on his Windows XP operating system. Windows XP would restart immediately and he was puzzled why this was happening. A quick lookup in the Microsoft Knowledgebase revealed that this was a rather common problem that could appear after installing new hardware.
Print Conductor is a small software for Microsoft Windows that can print multiple documents in a batch process which is invaluable if you happen to work with a lot of different file times throughout the day. The tool supports 16 file types including pdf, doc, txt, xls, ppt and dwg which means that probably the most common file extensions in offices are supported.
I'm always looking for ways to speed up my website and make it load faster for the visitor who is connecting to it. Webmasters can use a lot of services to determine the connection speed of their website and most optimize images which seem to be the biggest files on most websites these days.
Keyloggers record anything that you type and where you type it on your PC in a log and transfer those logs to the person - better thief - who did install the keylogger on your computer. He can then find out all the urls you visited, the passwords that you entered on those websites and what you did there as well.
I find it hard to tell how much time I have left to work with my notebook when running on battery and always thought it would be nice to have an application that would display the notebook battery status somewhere on screen. BattStatt is a small software that displays the battery status in the system tray when hovering over the icon.
This is a quick Windows tip that helps me from time to time when some windows in Microsoft Windows do not react anymore to user input and show that dreaded sand clock mouse cursor. This only works if Windows is still responsive. To shut down the Windows Explorer you need to hit Start > Shutdown (Turn off Computer on Windows XP) and click cancel on the shutdown dialog while holding the CTRL, Shift and ALT keys.
If you do not want to get rid of the full game I'm showing you how you can at least get rid of the intro movies that may look great when you start Unreal Tournament 3 for the first time but become a nuisance soon after. The following hack is actually one that you can use to disable intro movies for many games.
Cheryl emailed me this morning telling me that her password would not be accepted by Wordpress after registering a new account although she was sure that she did type it correctly. The message that would appear was always "Incorrect Password". My first step of solving this problem was to change the password to "test" and try the login procedure again.
Graham send me an email just a few minutes ago informing me that Youtube users could finally upload high definition videos to Youtube which have the benefit of a much sharper, clearer image and the negative side effect (for some users) of a size increase of the videos.
