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
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.
Google changed the clickzones of their Adsense ad units and most webmasters are reporting decreases in their ad unit click through rate and revenue. Many have seen a decrease between 1-2% in click through rate which reduced the earnings by a figure between 30-70%.
Rruben send me a link to an interesting software called Resizor which is an image resizer that utilizes the newly introduced seam carving technology to create impressive results. Instead of modifying the dimensions the same percentage throughout the image it analyzes areas that are less important and removes or adds to those with priority.
Firefox automatically adds a print header and footer when printing websites which is something that most users do not want. By default, page title and URL as well as the page number and time / date are added to each page that gets printed. It is not that obvious but it is possible to customize the printout.
I think we can all agree that the default way of removing software in Windows is probably the worst way possible. It takes ages until the Add or Remove Programs window populates the entries and removing entries is painfully slow and sometimes not working as well. I have been using MyUninstaller until now which is faster and comes with some comfort like removing entries from the list of installed programs and details about the software that has been installed.
I seldom come upon a software that is small and packed with so many useful features that should have been integrated in Windows in the first place. What I really do not understand is that Microsoft does not seem to look at those applications and put the most thought after functionality into their next Windows.
Running Windows XP on a hard drive or partition with the NTFS file system has several advantages. One of them being a increase in system and file security because it is possible to alter file access rights on a per user base. Most Windows users do not know that it is possible to set those rights much similar to those on Linux and Unix systems.
Every software that is installed using an installation routine will be added to the Add or Remove Programs Windows menu and can be uninstalled by any user who has access to this window. I'm going to explain a trick that removes the entry from the Add or Remove Programs window without removing the software itself.
Whenever you open the Command Prompt in Windows you are taken to a default directory which is usually your Documents and Settings \ Username directory. Most of the time you navigate away from it because you need to access files that cannot be accessed from there.
Deleted websites is probably not the right catchy phrase that I should use. What I mean is that it happens sometimes that you find a search result in Google or follow a link from another website only to find out that nothing is found. Sometimes the information that has been could be essential. Fortunately for us there is a way to display the contents for most "The Page cannot be displayed" websites.
This is going to blow you away. What do you normally do when you save a file or want to open a file in a specific folder on your hard drive ? You click your way through the folder structure of your operating system until you finally reach the desired folder. This is a thing of the past because we can use bookmarked folders to reach those folders instantly.
Have you ever wondered why the mouse cursor stops when you reach one of the monitor borders ? It feels like it is bumping right into a wall. CursorUs is a tiny 22K software that extends the mouse cursors functionality and lets the user move beyond this invisible wall. The mouse cursor will appear at the opposite end of the screen whenever it reaches the border of the monitor.
NTFS file systems have many advantages over FAT32 file systems that's why I would suggest to convert existing FAT32 partitions to NTFS. Let me first explain how you can find out which file system is used by a partition / hard drive in Windows. Click on My Computer and right-click the hard drive or partition that you want to check. A window should pop up displaying the File System of the selected drive.
Setting up custom icons for your hard drives, cd, dvd and removable drives can be an excellent way of visualizing the contents of the drives. Windows offers a way to change icons of folders but no obvious way to change the icons of those drives. I would like to point out two possibilities that allow it to change drive icons in Windows.
Inezha is a new startup that offers a innovative way of receiving feed updates from your favorite websites. The feeds that you add to the service are delivered right to your Instant Messenger, Skype or Mail box which offers some practical uses. I have Skype enabled all the time usually which means it is more convenient to receive feed updates in Skype instead of opening Netvibes or Google Reader.
Gigatribe is a software that creates a private Peer to Peer (P2P) network that offers a group of users, for example your friends and family, an easy way to share files securely. All communication is protected by a 256-bit Blowfish encryption so that no one can snoop on the files that you send and receive.
Just a quick fix to a computer problem that I encountered in the last days on an old computer of a friend who was using Internet Explorer 6. Nothing happened when he clicked on mailto email links on websites and he did not know why this happened. Normally his email software should open allowing him to write an email to the address of the link.
If you need to quickly check a file for malicious code that you downloaded then Virus Total might be something you might want to take a closer look at.This service stands out because it uses multiple antivirus engines instead of just one or two. The antivirus engines list looks pretty impressive because it contains 32 engines.
ZoneAlarm Anti-Spyware which comes bundled with the ZoneAlarm Firewall can be downloaded free of charge today. The security software retails regularly for $19.95 and includes one year of free updates as well. This offer expires on November 14th 5pm PST so hurry up if you would like to give this software a try.
The default source viewer for all browsers mentioned in the title is not optimal and sometimes posing more problems than solving them. Mozilla Firefox is displaying the source in a new stripped down Firefox window, the Internet Explorer is using Notepad and Opera is displaying it in a new Opera tab.
A list of tips was published at the official Google Adsense blog Inside Adsense which should help maximize revenue potential. The tips are to turn custom channels into ad placements which will highlight parts of your website to advertisers, to enable text and image ads on your website and to use the 300x250 medium rectangle because many advertisers use this specifically when creating rich media ads.
Every blog does it. Google does it. Many newspapers and web magazines do it. Ebay does it. Amazon does it. All have their websites divided into pages. If you take Google for example they divide the search results on different pages. Magazines divide their articles into chapters that generate more page impressions and display more advertisement at the same time.
Task Killer is a small but very useful Windows software which places a small icon in the system tray. Clicking that icon reveals all running processes, open windows and services in an easy to use interface. The processes give details about memory usage and name of course.
I spotted a huge process in my task manager today called MediaAgent.exe which used roughly 30 Megabytes of RAM. A quick check revealed that the process belonged to a OpenCASE Media Agent which I was not aware to have installed after all. My first fears that it was some sort of trojan, virus or spyware that managed to sneak into my system thankfully did not turn out to be true.
Windows ships with two calculators. The normal one and a scientific one that can be enabled in the View menu of the calculator. The normal calculator offers basic functionality while the scientific one adds functionality that most users do not need. The normal calculator in Windows uses a small window which appeals to many users.
I'm planing to purchase a PDA at the end of this year and would like to hear your opinion before I go out and buy something that does not meet my expectations. I never used a PDA before but tried to read about the different operating systems and the like to get a first overview.
I have explained the concept of par files before. In short, they can be used to repair any rar file that is part of the archive as long as the blocks of the par file are at least of the same size than the corrupt rar parts. A software like Quickpar can be used to split big files into smaller ones and create several par files to be able to recover the whole archive if part of it gets corrupted.
It is possible to install Firefox add-ons for all users that use a computer instead of installing them for every user separately. This is helpful if you are the computer guy in the family for instance and want everyone to have a basic set of extensions enabled that add functionality and security to the accounts.
I'm not sure what is causing it but I do know that a lot of users have difficulties opening PDF files in browsers. In my former tech related job I had to find a way to find out why those pdf documents were not shown in the Browser correctly and how it would be possible to fix this issue and make them display correctly.
Thunderbird saves the attachments together with the mail message which means that the mailboxes can grow rapidly if you regularly receive large attachments. This slows down Thunderbird eventually and could also pose a storage problem if you use the default profile location to store your emails.
Uploading files to websites like Youtube, Flickr, Facebook or Picasa is not really that comfortable, especially browsing your computer and selecting files works really bad. It is for instance not possible to upload files from more than one directory at once. Most websites limit the amount of files to ten and do not display a proper progress bar that explains what is going on at the moment.
Windows Media Player 11 is constantly monitoring several folders in the My Documents folder structure for media changes. If you do not use WMP 11 as your main media player you might be wasting resources caused by this monitoring. By default the My Music, My Pictures and My Videos folders are monitored and new files are automatically added to the Windows Media Player 11 library.
I'm a bit puzzled by the recent launch of NBC's Direct, a video downloads website just a few weeks after launching Hulu together with News Corp. Direct Video Downloads sound nice at first glance which is exactly what users would like. Instead of watching the tv episodes at Hulu online they can now download the videos and watch them whenever they feel fit to do it.
