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
It sure does have advantages to access mail accounts from a website like accessibility for instance. I never liked using webmailers that much because I did not like the thought that my mails would sit on a server somewhere on the Internet. The good news was that many webmailers such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail offered a way to access the mails using the Pop3 protocol and a mail client.
A friend of mine was telling me about a problem that he had with his website Love is a Game. A user posted a comment on Stumbleupon claiming that his website would contain a virus which his anti-virus software reported. He mentioned the name of the virus as well and a text string of a different domain. My though was that he had misinterpreted the warning and that it was a warning from another website and not from my friends website.
Did you know that Last.fm has a free mp3 download section on their music portal ? The Weekly Free Downloads category of Last.fm lists currently 189 songs that can be downloaded to your computer without charge. All songs are available on one page sorted by popularity. You do find some popular artists among them including Snoop Dog, Sarah Connor as well as some classics from Beethoven and Bach.
Amazon Subscribe and Save was mentioned in the Cybernet News RSS feed and it sounded that interesting that I decided to take a look at it myself and write a small article about it. The service offers a way to subscribe to household items and select a delivery schedule for those items. Shipping is free of charge and buyers do get a 15% discount on purchased items.
I have been using IRC quite a lot a few years ago and even then thought that software like MIRC was not ideal for beginners. It was not that easy to setup and had the charm of a Windows 95 application written all over it. I did switch to Chatzilla eventually which offered IRC access in Firefox which was great for a quick connect to IRC.
One of the latest security trends is to use virtual systems to protect the computer from harm. The benefit of those systems is that changes are only temporary and undone after the next reboot which means that you always start with a fresh system. Most users do not want to use virtual systems because they seem complicated to setup and maintain.
I never thought that highly about the Windows Vista exclusive add-on called Dreamscene which made it possible to display animated backgrounds in Windows. The main reason for my reservation was probably that I did not like the default videos that Microsoft was using to advertise Dreamscene.
I do not like printers that much, they always seem to run out of ink, have paper problems or do not react when needed. Setting up a printer in a local area network can be frustrating as well but this could be - thanks to Printer Anywhere - a thing of the past. Printer Anywhere makes it easy to send a print job to another computer that is also running Printer Anywhere.
Microsoft is often not using a standard format which is the case when you take a look at how Outlook Express saves the mails that have been send and received. Outlook Express saves the mails by default in dbx files instead of saving them in the wildly used mbx format which is being used by Thunderbird, Opera and most other email clients.
It does not make sense to start a hard drive defragmentation if the drive is not really fragmented. You might be loosing lots of time if you have scheduled those defragmentations. The defrag tool in Windows can be used to check the fragmentation level of a hard drive and we are going to use this to create a script that runs defrag only when the hard drive is fragmented.
Windows does not offer a way to prevent users from accessing executable files. While NTFS does offer a rights-system it is only valid of NTFS hard drives and does not come into effect if a user plugs in a USB drive, CD or floppy disk. Most computers get infected nowadays by executing email attachments followed by file downloads and Windows security holes.
The playlists that are generated by Windows Media Player have a different structure and file extension than generic m3u playlists which are supported by all software mp3 players. Windows Media Player Playlists are saved as .wpl files and a big difference is that they store the absolute path to the songs.
Scan Disk is the Windows tool that scans a hard drive for errors and bad sectors. The software is not really comfortable to use, it is for instance not possible to make the tool scan all hard drives at once. Check Disk is a Scan Disk replacement that offers a more comfortable way of checking your hard drives for errors.
When you open My Computer you see floppy disk drives, hard drives and DVD drives. Lots of space is wasted in that window and you have to click several times to reach the location that you wanted to. If you do have folders on your hard drives that you use over and over again you might want to consider creating folder drives which would make them appear as drives in My Computer.
The Windows Explorer default folder is the folder that is shown when Windows Explorer is started. This is the My Documents folder if you use Windows XP or the Documents folder if you happen to use Windows Vista. While most users might find it comfortable that those are the default folders others prefer to work with different folders and largely ignore the My Documents or Documents folder.
It sometimes is a good idea to check on the components that are installed on your computer. This is extremely important in my opinion if someone else repaired it or if it is a brand new computer to see if all the components are still inside and did not get replaced by other cheaper ones.
Microsoft killed the Autopatcher project some months ago which was a shock to everyone who used their monthly Windows Update collections to update their computer(s) which had several benefits such as downloading the updates only once and not connecting to a Microsoft server at all.
Microsoft is releasing a monthly Security Release Iso image which contains the security releases of that month packed on one Iso image. The benefit of this approach is not really obvious for home computers running just one version of an operating system by Microsoft but for networks with lots of installed operating systems.
Most software mp3 players do not report playback errors which is not such a big problem most of the time. It could however become one when you copy the mp3 to a player, be it software or hardware, that does not play the file because it checked for those errors before playing the mp3.
It can be quite a task to run Thunderbird on more than one computer and even running Thunderbird on one computer with more than one mail account can cause some problems. Filters are one of them. Mail filters can be global filters that filter all incoming mails or mail account filters which only filter mails that are send to the account in question.
Most of my advertisers pay me in Dollar and I have to convert that revenue to Euro which is either done by the advertisement company (Google Adsense for instance) or by cashing in a Dollar check at my local bank (Tribalfusion). When I started blogging I received €850 for $1000 which was not an excellent conversion rate but good enough.
NBC Direct is a software that will be installed on your computer if you want to watch the videos offered at the NBC Direct website. Before NBC Direct is installed the Open Case Media Agent is installed on your system as well which is used for distributing content and managing rights.
Microsoft has introduced so called add-ins in Microsoft Office and Word which are first-party or third-party applications that extend the functionality of the software. One add-in in particular is being a great asset for me personally, it is called the 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS and works with eight Office programs including Microsoft Word 2007 and Excel 2007.
Most notebooks tend to run out of power quickly and most of the time in an inappropriate moment. What most users do not know is that every component in the notebook is using power even if you are not using it at the moment. This leads to the conclusion that disabling unneeded components would save power and thus prolong the work time.
Windows gives you no choice but to use the default printer when using the Send To right-click menu. This is not problematic if you only use one printer but if you are working in a place with several printers it could become a nuisance. There is always a way though to make things work the way we want them to.
Wlandscape is a Java application that displays the Wlans in a specified area on a street map making it so much easier to identify possible hotspots that can be used to access the Internet. The software needs some batch file editing before it can be used, nothing serious though.
I let it slip once or twice in the comments that I'm going to buy and build a new computer in the first quarter of the next year. I just once bought a pre-assembled computer and since then decided to select the hardware components and build it by myself. This has some advantages but also several disadvantages which I would like to shortly address.
A rule of thumb is that websites or servers go down in an inappropriate moment either when you are sleeping, at work or in another location where you cannot check if your website or server is still up and running. A website that is not available for eight ore more consecutive hours can do serious harm to its reputation and possible revenue that is generated.
Hello to Alexqjm, Demetri and thousand other random usernames that you like to use to post a fake comment on my website thanking me for that article using a homepage link that points to your Viagra, Cars, Russian Brides, fake Rolex watches and other bullshit that no sane person would ever buy from you.
Many users save their passwords in Firefox so that they do not have to enter it again when visiting the website it was saved for again. Firefox remembers the password and enters it automatically if the user selected this option on his first visit. This is great for us lazy users but poses the problem that we sometimes can't remember the password when we need it again.
I'm really excited about this new technology that will make its way and replace those magnetic hard drives in the long run. Solid State hard drives are based on flash memory which you usually find in most mp3 players these days. They have several advantages in comparison to magnetic hard drives.
It's becoming dark and cold outside sooner these days which is in my opinion the best time for some serious PC winter cleaning. I'm doing those cleaning once every three months to make sure my computer runs stable and without ballast that drags performance down. This article will only look at the software and operating system and not on the hardware which could be optimized as well by looking for firmware and bios upgrades.
Thumbwin was mentioned by a few readers in my Bring Order to your Desktop and Taskbar article which described a software called Minimize which allowed the user to display minimized windows as thumbnails. Thumbwin is apparently a software of choice for some of my readers and that is good enough for me to take a look at it and review it here at Ghacks.
How do you cut a Mango, add more Gigabyte to an Ipod Mini, build a Geometric Cut Paper Table Lamp or date a girl who is way out of your league. ? All of those questions and many more are answered on the Instructables websites which is a community driven website showing people how to create and do things. Two type of instructions are available and it depends on the author if the instructions are by video or by screenshots.
By default Windows XP searches only inside a handful of selected file types and ignores file types that are not registered in Windows. This means for instance that the Windows search is not searching through php documents. Here is a quick Registry hack that enables searching in all file types and not only a selected few.
Every window that gets minimized is placed in the taskbar which holds a limited amount of windows and starts to group windows of the same process together to save space. MiniMize is a software that brings order into that chaos. Instead of minimizing windows to the taskbar it displays them as thumbnails on your desktop.
I have been using Antivirus software for a very long time and even though I kept it up to date it never catched a single virus, worm or Trojan. It did however slow down system startup and the scan of new files also used system resources. This let to my conclusion that I did not need a Antivirus software, because frankly, Antivirus software is basically preventing the user from doing something stupid.
I have written about the web service Anothr just a few days ago. This service made it possible to receive RSS Feed updates in Skype, MSN and Google Talk and turned out to be pretty useful to some readers. I discovered another service that is offering RSS Feed updates send directly to Instant Messengers.
Songza is a music search engine that searches websites for music of the artist, band or song that you enter into the search form. Most interesting is the fact that they mainly search Youtube for those artists or songs. Don't yell at me just yet, this is not another "Search Youtube, display Videos" type of website.
Automatic Updates means that your computer will check periodically if updates for Windows XP are available and install the automatically if it finds any. The computer needs to be restarted after installing those Windows updates because some files can't be exchanged while the operating system runs.
