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
The first thing that I'm doing after I bought a computer, be it used or retail, is to check if the components installed are indeed the components advertised. I personally think this is essentially because I witnessed more than once that a computer that was sold did not contain the components that the seller claimed it would.
The developers of the now defunct Allofmp3 website announced a new website called ZML - The Movie Library - that offers movies in three different versions for prices that will cause the concern of the MPAA. The lowest price for a full movie begins at $1.99 which is the version for iPods with a width of 320 pixels.
Windows XP has a very confusing way of listing files in directories. Let me give you a small explanation. How would Windows XP sort the files abc1, abc101, abc4, abc401, abc8 ? No, it is not like I have ordered them in the last sentence. The default order for those files would be abc1, abc4, abc8, abc101 and abc401. The reason behind this is that Windows XP considers the numbers to be just that which means that 101 is a larger number than 4 or 8.
Did it ever happen to you that a double-click on a file lead to moving the file instead for a pixels in the direction that you moved the mouse ? If you try to double-click a file and move the mouse for more than four pixels after the first click the file will be moved instead of executed.
I recently visited a friend of mine who had a huge problem with his computer. His main hard drive was filling with data rapidly although he only had the operating system and some applications installed. It turned out that System Restore was using more than 12 Gigabytes of space on this drive alone.
When I first read about Backup to Email I thought that surely no one wanted to backup files and folders to email. I never thought that email would make a good backup alternative for backing up large files and folders considering file size limitations and upload speeds of the own Internet connection.
I sometimes want to cut mp3 audio files into separate parts, mainly because the single file is that large that it does not fit on my mp3 player. This is also useful to create mp3 ringtones who only use the first 30 seconds of a song anyway. It does work the other way round as well.
Using vector images has many advantages over using raster images. While raster images are based on pixels vector images are based on geometric figures which means that they can be scaled without making the image blurry or pixelated.
Google Maps on its own is a wonderful application but mashups really make it one of a kind. Mashups are third party applications that use Google Maps and its API plus their own coding to create something new. I thought it would be nice to create a list of six great Google Maps mashups so that everyone who has not taken a closer look will have a good starting point and those who already know Google Maps and mashups might still find something they did not know about.
You might be puzzled at first if you encounter an audio file with the ape extension for the first time. Trying to play it in Winamp, Windows Media Player and XMPlay will not be successful, in fact, the song will not be loaded at all. The Ape file format is a lossless compression format of the compressor Monkey's Audio.
If you are looking for a highly configurable system monitor you should take a closer look at Glint. The software displays system activity of many - and I really mean many - different values. The default program window alone displays 26 different values like CPU Processor Time, Disk Read and Write Bytes and Memory Bytes available.
Did you know that the default setting for the Skype Chat History is forever ? That means, every chat with every contact is still visible using the View Chat History right-click menu option. This could be a privacy related issue if someone else has access to your computer.
You might have never entered a Windows or Office product key before in your life. If you did buy a preinstalled version of Windows for example it could already be activated by the default. The product key can be usually found on the Recovery CD that comes with the purchase of the hardware, on the hardware itself or on a booklet.
Email collectors behold ! Microsoft is finally making @live.com IDs available to the public. The whole signup process is heavily interactive and Ajax like elements pop up all the time giving information and links to further information.
If you use Firebug and visit Gmail you receive a message "Firebug is known to make Google Mail slow unless it is configured correctly" which was not known by me. Google suggests to disable Firebug for the Google domain completely which should not be a huge problem normally.
A url that is not linked on a website, like www.ghacks.net can not be clicked on to load the website. The user has to copy and paste the url into the address bar to load it which is highly uncomfortable. A way to get past this would be to install the Text Link extension for Firefox.
When I was young I was astonished by the fact that the top music albums of each country varied a lot. There were surely those million sellers that made their way into virtually all charts of this world but most of the time the chart music was different. Great Britain for instance was always way ahead of my country and it was always a good market to see what would be in the charts soon in my country.
I wish there were websites like Algebasics when I was in school, they would have been really helpful and supportive. Algebasics explains all things Algebra in a clean and understandable way. The sixteen main sections like The Basics, Linear Equations and Polynomials are all divided into several sheets that explain various concepts within the chapters.
The hard drive properties window gives information about used and free space both in numbers and as a pie chart, offers a Disk Cleanup button, a way to change the drive description and it is the location where you turn drive compression and drive indexing on and off. If you have more than one hard drive you might want to get their information all at once instead of right-clicking the hard drives one at a time.
The build in Windows search is slow, really slow compared to a software like Locate that indexes all of your files on all hard drives and offers almost instantaneous results. But let us start at the beginning. Locate32 is a small software for Windows that works like updatedb and locate on Unix machines.
Most Instant Messengers offer a function to hide your real status from your contacts and buddies by showing a faked offline status. People use it mainly to be able to work uninterrupted.
There is however a way to find out if your Yahoo contact or buddy is really offline or only faking that he is offline. It basically lets you detect if they use the invisible mode in Yahoo Messenger.
My dllcache folder in system32 has a size of almost 450 Megabytes on my Windows partition. The dllcache is used to replace a system file (dll) that has been changed with the original one. It bothers me that this feature of Windows takes up so much space on my hard drive. It is even more serious in my case because I decided to have a rather small Windows partition, every byte counts if you know what I mean.
While you can buy hundreds of different calendars each year depicting celebrities, comic book heroes, nature, animals and landscapes you could be inclined to create a custom, unique calendar to either use by yourself or give to someone that you like very much. Custom calendars can make great gifts, especially if the person who receives them feels connected to the pictures of the calendar.
If you do use Opera you might have noticed that Opera seems to always bring up the save to dialog and you have to browse to the download location even if you downloaded a file of the same type just a minute ago. The line "Remember choice and do not show dialog again" is grayed out and can't be checked as well.
You might have encountered foto mosaics before which show one picture that was build using many smaller pictures. I think that they look really nice if done correctly and with enough distinctive smaller pictures. One software that lets you create Foto Mosaics is called Foto Mosaik.
Windows Media Player adds context items to the right-click menu of several multimedia files even if you do not use this player to play those files. It would be nice to get rid of those items in the context menu to decrease the size of the menu and have only options in there that are needed. There is however no obvious option to remove the three entries which means that we once again have to rely on the Registry to fix this issue.
Nothing can be more frustrating than to listen to some great tune on Internet Radio which suddenly starts to skip ruining all the fun. The following, pretty obvious method, helps most of the time if you regularly experience stutters, slowdowns or skippings when listening to Internet Radio.
Don't you hate it that it is not possible to assign a drive letter to an USB device in Windows using Microsoft tools ? Let me correct that, it is possible to assign drive letters to USB devices under some circumstances using Disk Management. This is however not working for all USB devices.
The Windows Calculator does not increase its font size or appearance if your screen resolution is relatively large. It will always display the characters in an eight pixel font size which displays them ridiculously small if your use a large screen resolution.
Not every game runs perfectly with the default settings. Some drop in performance more than others when increasing quality settings such as Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic-Filtering while others show no gain in quality when raising certain settings.
Emails can be send to several recipients at once by using the CC or BCC fields which send a Carbon Copy or Blind Carbon Copy to the recipients listed there. Using the BCC option is useful if you want that every recipient is only able to see his email address and not the email of everyone else who receives a message.
Hard Drives can be terribly noise makers in computers. This is especially true when you are one of those users who buys silent pc hardware and uses fan regulators to lower the noise of system fans. When the noise of those fans is lowered other noises can probably be heard that you did not recognize before.
You might have encountered the term Port Forwarding when configuring bittorrent on your computer or analyzing slow or none existing traffic with bittorrent. One of the first answers of those helpful support guys in all forums is always check Port Forwarding, but what the heck is it ?
I was specifically asked by a reader if it was possible to search Mediafire for files like videos, music and applications and you know I can't say no if one of my reader requests something. Mediafire is a file hosting site like Rapidshare and Megaupload with apparently no storage limitation and a file size limit of 100 Megabyte.
A non fixed Microsoft Excel 2007 has calculation issues with certain numbers. Two scenarios exist that result in a false value being shown as the result of a calculation. If the result of a calculation is a number between 65534.99999999995 to 65535 the result will be shown as 100000 instead.
The Firefox add-on Fancy Numbered Tabs replaces the red X with numbers. Replaces is probably not the best term for this because the X is still available if you hover your mouse over the number. You might wonder why numbering the tabs could be useful, let me explain.
The Show Desktop shortcut in the quick launch bar minimizes all open windows upon pressing the button. If you accidentally deleted that shortcut from the quick launch bar you might face a hard time getting it back there because there is no obvious way to create a Show Desktop shortcut.
I had lots of messages in my Thunderbird mail accounts. More than 1200 send messages and more than 1500 incoming message. The send messages alone had a size of more than 25 Megabytes while the incoming a combined size of more than 800 Megabytes. This made my decision to clean up the mails even easier.
I think it is really interesting that a lot of unusual problems start to appear on blogs and websites that users have with Windows Vista. Makes me think why no one found out about it during the extensive beta tests but that is another story. The How-To Geek is reporting a problem with large zip files under Windows Vista.
I do take a close look at the processes that are running on my system from time to time to make sure that no malicious process snug in. Sometimes I find a new process that I never saw before in the task manager and use the Internet to find out more information about it.
