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
You might have noticed a lot of hidden files in your Windows directory starting with the string $NtUninstall and maybe you asked yourself the question if it was save to delete those files. Those $NtUninstall are created whenever you install a new service pack or patch from Microsoft. Most folders end with KBxxxxxx which related to the corresponding Knowledge Base article about the update.
Did you know that your system might have more user accounts than you thought it would have. Think about it for a while and write down the number of existing user accounts. If that number is below four you have missed some. Let me explain to you how you can find out which user accounts exist on your system and how to delete or secure those that you do not need.
Every software that is starting during system startup is delaying the system boot process. You might not notice an increase if the software is small but there are applications like those from Norton for instance that can delay it by more than a minute. It is therefor always a good idea to check which softwares are starting during Windows startup and get rid of any that are not necessary.
Simple Delicious is a Firefox add-on which displays a users delicious bookmarks in Firefox. We all know that it can be quite useful to use a service like Delicious to store all of your bookmarks on the web to be able to access them from anywhere. Webmasters use this service as well to promote links from their own websites.
The blogosphere was going crazy last week with rumors about the sudden Pagerank drops of several authority sites like Problogger or The Washington Post. Soon enough lots of theories made the round which ranged from being punished because of selling links to being in a blog network that would list all of its sites in the sidebar.
Every company that has it's own website or software seems to advertise their toolbar that you need to install on your system. Spammers also like toolbars and most computers have many toolbars installed that are most of the time simply unnecessary. The real difficulty begins when you try and uninstall a toolbar which is not as easy as it sounds.
A white background with blue links and black text is how the default Google website looks like. While this might be effective and offers a great usability it looks pretty boring but this is going to change right now. It is possible to redesign Google Web Search if you use Firefox.
Folders in Windows look all the same which serves the purpose of being able to recognize them immediately. While this might be nice for novice computer users advanced users might want to change the appearance of some of the folders to make them stick out from the rest.
How are you writing down notes when working with your computer ? Do you create text documents and write the notes in there, do you use Post-It notes and stick them to your monitor or desktop or do you prefer to use a software like Shock Sticker which combines the Post-It functionality with that of the text document ?
While Windows XP and Vista offer a way to pin files to the Start Menu both operating systems do not offer a way to pin folders to it. You might have noticed that a right-click on a file on your hard drive does not give the option to pin it to the Start Menu as well, it only appears if you press the shift key while right-clicking the file.
I was always puzzled by the fact that uninstallers would not delete all data, folders and files created by an installation script but would leave traces of that program on the system. What sense does it make to keep registry settings, config files or empty folders on the system if the user opts to remove the software ?
Reading books using a mobile phone is probably not the most pleasant way but it surely is better than sitting around doing nothing at all. Books in My Phone provide hundreds of books that can be downloaded and transferred to your mobile phone. The user can chose between two ways to transfer the books to his mobile phone.
There are two types of clones of successful website concepts on the web. The first copies the concept and publishes a similar website under a different name, the second copies part of the name and the concept over to another area. Giftube is trying the latter by being the 'Youtube' for Gifs, that is small animated graphics.
The Add Bookmarks dialog windows is not really the best example of usability in Firefox. The default window just shows a 'Create in Bookmarks' folder and the user has to click the down arrow to expand this menu and display his folder structure. If you like your things organized you probably have created a rather large folder structure in which you place your bookmarks.
Even if you do use Yahoo search regularly you might have missed the Yahoo Search Assist feature. To be honest, i had no desire to use Yahoo as a search engine until the recent actions of Google made me change my mind. Ankit, who recently commented on my blog wrote an interesting article about Yahoo Search Assist and I decided to give it a go.
Windows does not automatically delete temporary files during system shutdown. This means that deleted files in the trashbin and temporary files like those in the Internet Cache are still accessible after a restart of the system. System cleaners like CCleaner or Disk Cleaner are able to delete those files but I would like to show a way how many of them can be deleted by using a Windows system tool.
I was thinking about looking at other services that I could try to see if they were any better than the Google services that I'm using at the moment when I came upon a post by Everton who was writing about the same thing at this blog. His main domain received a major Pagerank decrease from 6 to 3 and this made him realize that it is probably the time to move on and look for services that do it better than Google.
Self Image is an Open-Source hard disk imaging tool. It is capable of backing up hard drives or partitions even if those partitions or hard disks are not mounted in Windows. This means that it is for instance possible to backup a Linux partition in Windows using Self Image.
I don't want to make a big fuss about it. I tried lots of softwares that record Internet Radio streams and found one that was the perfect fit for my situation. I prefer a software that would function as my main music player and be able to record Internet Radio streams over a software that would have the ability to record the streams but that I would never use to listen to music.
A new version of the blogging plattform Wordpress has been released today. It is an advised update for every webmaster especially for those with register_globals enabled. A security vulnerability was found that can be exploited if that setting is enabled.
I'm using Google Adsense for more than two years to monetize Ghacks and experienced some ups and downs. I thought it would be nice to create a graph that would put Adsense revenue in relation to the traffic that my website received. This could give courage to those webmasters who are currently struggling with their Adsense revenue especially when it dropped suddenly while the traffic remained more or less on the same level.
Covert Front is an 'Escape the Room' game with beautiful graphics and nice sound effects. The gameplay is similar to point and click adventures where you have to find items and objects and combine them with each other to proceed in the game. The setting of the game is the beginning 19th century using an alternate time-line.
I received two of those fake emails today and thought that it would be a good opportunity to dissect it to show how phishing emails try to lure customers into a trap. The first and most obvious hint that something is wrong with this email is if you think about the subject of the email.
Firefox by default has a so called auto complete feature which searches for urls that have been typed in or accessed in the past when the user begins to type a url. While this feature is mostly a time safer it nevertheless begins to pile up a large amount of urls which make the process rather messy.
PC Pal is a software that is currently in Beta that checks your Windows installation for weaknesses and possibilities to optimize it. The process is very user friendly and requires minimal user interaction. Basically the user pushes one button and PC Pal checks the computer for problems related to security, networking, printing and performance.
You need to use the tools of the trade to check if your website is revealing emails from visitors or yourself. Most webmasters have a contact form somewhere on the page which is sometimes revealing the real email address of the webmaster. But even tricks like adding spaces to the email address, a REMOVEME part, writing (at) instead of @ and other means are recognizable by some email harvesters that do nothing else but to harvest websites and the websites that they link to for new email addresses.
Many popular websites and blogs have been hit with Pagerank decreases in the last days. Most went down two points (some even three) from one day to the other. The Pagerank drop does not seem to have an influence on other factors like website traffic or Adsense. It does seem pretty random though, some websites get hit, others that do the same do not get hit at all.
Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista have both a TCP/IP connection limit that limits the half-open connections of the system. If that limit is reached a new entry in the Event Viewer is created stating "EventID 4226: TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts.".
Bin and Cue, Img and Iso files are CD and DVD formats that store all the information of the CD or DVD. Users come across them on many occasions such as Linux distributions, Open Source software distributed on CDs and of course when downloading files from P2P networks, ftp, irc or the Usenet.
Not many users like Windows Vista. It surely looks better than Windows XP, but other than that ? Please raise your hand if you think that UAC is more annoying than helpful. Windows Vista is just not that ready for prime time and there is not really a good reason to make the switch.
Price Drop is a Firefox add-on that gives the user the option to track prices for selected items at the Amazon.com online store and notify him when the price drops. Besides keeping track of prices drops at the Amazon store it also notifies you if the price dropped after purchasing the item which helps getting a refund for the item that you bought because of the lower price.
Feedburner displayed a redirection link to my article instead of the direct link to the article on my blog. In case you are wondering: Feedburner is a service that blog owners can use to distribute their feed, get statistics and ensure maximum compatibility with most feedreaders out there.
Flippress is a German startup that is currently in the process of creating a website that will allow everyone to create their own customized paper keyboards which can be used as any normal keyboard on the market with the difference that it is completely made of paper.
You might have noticed a process with the name ctfmon.exe when opening the task manager wondering what it was doing and if it was malicious or harmful in any way. A quick search on the web revealed that it is a Windows process for advanced text services. You furthermore might have noticed that this process activates itself again even if you use msconfig to disable it from starting with Windows.
Oxygen Office Professional was formerly known as Open Office Premium, so basically a modified version of Open Office with lots of extras that remind me of the extras that ship with Microsoft Office. The extras include more than 3400 images including clip arts and photos, more than 90 fonts, templates and sample documents, VBA support, better PDF support and lots more.
Google increased the storage limit for Gmail users just recently who have now roughly four Gigabytes at their disposal with the option to add even more storage that can be purchased in the account settings. The maximum amount is currently 400 Gigabytes of storage which would cost $500 per year.
Brian was nice enough to send me an invite for the gaming website The Casual Collective which takes a different stance than all those other arcade sites out there. The Casual Collective is run by game programmers who publish their games exclusively on the website which means that this is the only way that you can officially play the games.
I'm playing Team Fortress 2 for a while know and thought that it would be nice to share the knowledge and expertise that I gained while playing the Beta of Team Fortress 2 with players who just got the game recently.
In theory websites can use your browsers cache to determine if and when you visited another website. To do this a website would simply have to know which images, or other files, are used on the website that is probed. So, if image test.jpg is loaded from the cache instead of the second website it is safe to assume that the user has been visiting the first website as well.
I was looking for a way to keep track of my expenses and earnings and found the software Buddi to be sufficient for my needs. I'm using it mainly to analyze my online activities, the earnings of my websites and the expenses that I have monthly. Buddi has a nice way of displaying statistics that give a quick overview which should be sufficient for most users.
