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 location bar, or address bar, in Firefox displays the url of the website that you are visiting. The website is normally displayed without dashes and contains the protocol, the subdomain, the domain name and the path. A less confusing way especially for novice or insecure users would be to divide the url into different parts.
I described a way to compress the Windows registry manually yesterday. The process itself was not really complicated but it involved booting into DOS to complete the changes to the registry that have been made by the process. Tehmul (more of that please) commented in that article pointing to a software named NTREGOPT (NT Registry Optimizer) which would optimize the full registry and perform the replacement during the next system boot automatically.
Unlike most commercial developers the freeware scene is always good for a surprise. Tower of Goo Unlimited is such a pleasant surprise. It is a small game that does not have to be installed at all. The task is to build a tower of goo by connecting drops of go that stick to each other.
The Windows registry is growing with every piece of software and system changes and never gets reduced again on its own. While this is not a problem for most users it could become for users who make lots of changes to their system. A huge registry is slowing down system load which is actually the number one reason why a user should check his registry from time to time and compress it so that it system load time gets reduced again.
Listing all installed multimedia codecs is an easy task if you use the software Installed Codec from Nirsoft. The software scans the registry in two places looking for installed codecs displaying them afterwards in a list that can be sorted in a few different ways.
Firefox just appends a new bookmark at the end of the folder that you saved the bookmark into unless you drag and drop the new bookmark into the location. This makes it rather difficulty to search through your existing bookmarks because you have to remember when you added the bookmark as well if you have a lot of bookmarks saved.
I recently came upon a series of video game reviews called Zero Punctuation over at the Escapist Magazine which could probably described as reviews in a hurry. Yahtzee Croshaw, the guy doing the reviews, was apparently born with the talent to talk pretty fast which he is doing in those reviews that usually last between three to five minutes.
If you did check your computer for huge files that wasted lots of disk space you might have come upon a file called hiberfil.sys sitting in your C: drive with a size anywhere between 512 Megabytes and 4 Gigabytes depending on the RAM in your computer. If you choose to go into Hibernation mode in Windows the operating system will save everything stored in RAM to your hard drive which results in this huge file hiberfil.sys
My Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox is filled with lots of bookmarks, many of them stored in folders to stuff even more bookmarks into the space of a single toolbar. While the Bookmarks Toolbar is useful for accessing websites fast it has one limitation that made me do some research to see if there would be a way to fix it.
RightLoad adds the ability to upload selected files to a ftp directly which removes the step to start the ftp client, choose the ftp server, browse the local hard drives and the possible location on the ftp server. All this can be set in RightLoad which should be a really useful software for most webmasters who regularly upload files to their ftps.
B-movies are low cost or budget movies set in a certain genre like Horror or Science Fiction. Not all have been bad movies and some were the first part to fame for actors such as Jack Nicholson or John Wayne. Bmovies.com is a website that makes available hundreds of B-movies to viewers from all over the world. The real beauty is that those movies can be streamed - and thus watched - on the website .
I always keep my notebook in sight when I travel around or sit in a public place like a library or Internet cafe. Not only because of the fear that someone could grab and steal it but also because someone could install software, invade my privacy or use the notebook for malicious activities.
If you have bought a TFT monitor you might want to consider using a software like Dead Pixel Tester to see if it has any dead pixels. This could for instance be useful to see if it is possible to get the current monitor replaced by a new one because of to many dead pixels.
If you are using Firefox's option to save usernames and passwords for websites that you visited to automatically fill them in when you visit them again you might find a Greasemonkey script called AutologinJ useful. I'm not quite sure what the J stands for but this nice little script presses the login button for you automatically which pretty much means that you can lean back and enjoy the show while Firefox logs you in automatically to the website that you just visited.
The build in Opera popup blocker notifies the user every time that it blocked a popup successfully resulting in a small notification overlay in the top right corner of the screen. While this might be useful under certain circumstances it becomes quickly annoying especially for web savvy users who know their way around the web.
While the automatic update function in Windows XP and Vista is a good way to keep your system up to date with the latest patches it has the nasty habit to nag the user after downloading the patches to the computer. I suppose everyone has received a message that asks the user if he wants to reboot now or reboot later in XP or the dialog box that asks you to restart your computer to finish installing important updates in Windows Vista.
Website owners should create their own favicons that are placed in that tiny space next to your url and consist normally of 16x16 pixels. They show up in the bookmarks section of your browser as well and several extension for Firefox let you replace the text of the tabs with just the favicon of the websites.
Zoogmo offers a way to securely backup personal data and store that data on so called partner computers. Partner computers can be anything from USB devices, network computers or even the computer of your friend that you can access over the Internet. The advantage of this approach is that you backup will be stored in an encrypted form on an external computer so that it remains accessible in the case of a computer crash.
If you experience troubles playing movies using the DIVX codec that is installed on your computer you might want to take a look at a bundle of fixes for DivX that is called All In One Fix. This is not intended for users who use ffdshow for instance to play movies, only for those who are actually using the DIVX codec.
Does it make sense to embed a web browser like Firefox or a Voice over IP client like Skype into a motherboard ? It surely has some advantages like fast boot times and increased security because everything done using those softwares is stored inside the RAM and not on the hard drive.
The title of this article might be a little confusing at first glance. Why would someone want to scan files in a directory for certain strings and output them in a new file ? Few ideas come to my mind why this could be useful. Imagine that you were surfing a website with lots of images that you liked very much. You could download those images manually or use the software Win Text File Patch to scan all files in your browsers cache for a certain string and output them in a new file.
I'm a regular at several webmaster forums where I tend to read up on the latest trends and techniques. While forums are great for exchanging and gaining knowledge they have one disadvantage and that is that one needs to be online to be able to read what has been written there.
I wrote about some real heavyweights the last Fridays which is why I would like to write about a pretty interesting flash game today. Treasure of the Cutlass Reef is a game that reminded me a little bit of the oldschool Pirates on the C-64 back in the time when wonderful games would fit on a disk that had storage capacities of less than one Megabyte.
I don't understand why no one did create a software that would connect people form around the world to jam with each other and create music that way. This is one natural application that would make it easier for everyone from beginning musicians to bands that are separated and need to jam with each other.
I'm sick and tired of a new kind of blog spam that is appearing on the Internet in general and on my site in particular. So called auto-blogs, that is blogs that are running an automated script adding content to their website without user interaction, are pinging the blogs that they rip off like crazy for a reason.
Microsoft Office 2007 uses a new standard to save documents. You might have noticed that the documents saved are no longer named document.doc but document.docx. While this is not per se a problem for users with Office 2007 it is a major one for everyone else.
Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Oasis, Jamiroquai and even Madonna have something in common. They all decided to turn their backs on the Music Industry and either market their albums directly or - in the case of Madonna - use a company that is not related to the Music Industry.
I don't like to take my purchased movie DVDs with me when I travel but still love to have some of my favorite or new movies with me in case I would like to watch a movie on my notebook. I could of course burn those DVDs and take the backups with me but this is not ideal in my opinion. I do not like to carry any media with me when traveling.
I was looking for a way to turn on and off Internet Radio while in applications that were running in fullscreen. I think I mentioned that I'm playing Team Fortress 2 at the moment with a few Buddies of mine. We use Teamspeak to communicate while playing. It happens that I'm the only one in Teamspeak which is why I start Internet Radio and leave it running in the background while playing alone.
If you share a computer with several other users you might have noticed that it is not possible to set a differing screen resolution, refresh rate and color depth for each user. Windows XP forces each user to use the same resolution, refresh rate and color depth which is a great annoyance.
A friend of mine was recently asking me if I knew how to find out which BIOS was installed in his computer. He wanted to know for two reasons. The first was that he could not remember and was not able to figure out on his own. He did want to buy a better CPU and had to know which were supported by his motherboard and BIOS.
Updatestar seems to be the most comprehensive software to scan your system for installed applications and check whether updates for those found are available. I did try several similar applications like Secunia Personal Software Inspector in the past but was somewhat disappointed by the small amount of softwares that could be detected.
UAC is the Windows Vista User Account Control. UAC is basically another way to protect the computer from the user, or the user from himself. Much like those 'Do you really want to delete this file ?' questions UAC asks the user to give an application additional privileges even if he is currently logged on as the administrator. So, it is basically asking the user the question 'Do you really want to execute the following application ?'.
Clicking on Start, All Programs, the folder of the software that you want to start and finally the software is the normal way to start applications using the Windows start menu. Unfortunately though it closes every time you have started a software from it which means that you have to follow the same path again if you want to open another application from it.
Taking Windows Registry snapshots can be a way to analyze changes that have been made to the system during a set period of time. The time being of course the days, hours or minutes between the first and second snapshot.
What has been a rumor for some months seems to have become reality in the last weeks. Google is starting to punish websites that are selling links by dropping the sites Pagerank. Danny Sullivan noticed a huge Pagerank drop from 9 to 7 on the Stanford Daily website which happened to sell links since 2005.
Some countries on earth are trying their best to keep their citizens from accessing the Internet freely out of fear that ideas of freedom and liberty would spread like wildfire throughout the country. China, notorious for blocking websites has started to realize that its citizens were able to read all those forbidden writings by simply accessing the feeds of those websites.
Hotkeys can really speed up the daily working routine in Windows. Instead of using the start menu, shortcuts on the desktop or the Windows Explorer you simply press a few buttons which start the software automatically.
I recently discovered Qliner Hotkeys which is in my opinion close to perfect. The real advantage of Qliner Hotkeys is that it displays a graphical keyboard of all hotkeys currently in place. Users can drag and drop softwares around and browse their system for applications to add to spare keys.
Just a quick login into Gmail at work to see if I received any new mails. Oh, no. My Boss is coming. What now. Panic ! If you experienced a situation like that, be it at work, school or even at home you wished for a function to quickly hide any window that should not be open right now.
I never played around with Google Earth for long and did not follow the news that closely. Maybe that is why I never heard about the flight simulator that is build into Google Earth. I read about it today in a computer magazine and thought it would be cool enough to post it along to all those other unknowing ones.
