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
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.
We all have some sites that we visit regularly throughout the day. It's my site of course for me, Gmail and a forum that I hang out all the time. It does happen from time to time that I accidentally close one of those tabs that I need throughout the day only to find myself opening it again in the next second.
The open and save dialogs in Windows have the nasty habit of not remembering any of the changes that you made while using them. I prefer a wider window to be able to read all filenames, navigate more easily through the folder structure and have more details in sight all the time.
Windows Vista has that feature build in that lets you flip through all the open Windows by pressing Alt + Tab. This feature is called Windows Flip in Windows Vista and is available in all editions of Vista except Home Basic.
It is sometimes important to concentrate on a task at hand and blend out everything that is not related to it. This could be the case when reading an interesting article, editing a Microsoft Word document or playing a flash game. Everything around the needed area could be a distraction.
Microsoft must be desperate. That was my first thought when I read that Microsoft made the decision to remove the Windows Genuine Advantage validation check from the download and installation of Internet Explorer 7. I was not able to come up with any other explanation why they decided to turn around 180 degrees and head for the other direction.
I never use the Send To menu in Windows. Never saw a reason why I should use it but I know that some love it to send files quickly to a defined folder or attach them to an email. As usual it is rather complicated to manipulate the Send To menu in Windows directly which is why users who would like to do so have to rely - as always - on third party developers.
Weekend Fun time again. H2O, no not Water but Heaven to Ocean, is a nice plattform puzzle game putting the player in control of a rather large water drop who craves to get back to the Ocean. To achieve this goal the player needs to move the drop around the screen by tilting the screen to the left or the right.
I knew we were going to see more PC and Wiimote mashups this year. After being able to play several shooters on the pc with the remote it was only a matter of time until someone would introduce applications or even a complete user interface utilizing the Wiimote.
Self-expiring, disposable or temporary emails have been around for some time and are quite useful for quickly joining a website that forces its users to register before they can see the content or participate. Disposable Websites on the other hand is a concept that I never heard before.
I really never bothered to take a look at the available themes for the Firefox browser thinking that all they would do was to add more Kilobytes to Firefox's memory consumption. Besides that: what cool looking themes could possibly be available for Firefox anyway ?
That is at least what Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG, said when questioned in court about her music piracy understanding. I think that this is one of the main reasons why the Music Industry is doing so badly. Their view collides with the demand of the consumers.
The makers of CCleaner and Recuva have created a new software called Defraggler which is a defragmentation software for Microsoft Windows 2000 up to Windows Vista. Defraggler introduces some new features that most - if not all - other defragmentation softwares are missing.
While the Master Password in Firefox is a useful security addition it can soon become a burden if you lost the password that you entered there. There is no way of simply looking into a file and copying your master password from it, would not make much sense at all to add a master password that could be looked up in a file.
If you prefer Open Office over Microsoft Office you might find the following plugin for Open Office useful. The so called Writers Tools for Open Office are a set of new functions that are added as a new menu in the software.
What began as a blog to promote a software that a friend of mine has written turned to be into something bigger - much bigger. I never thought about the possibility to make a living from blogging in the beginning but I can tell you that much: it is possible to do that.
I can't stress the importance of the master password in Firefox if you are one of the users who is letting Firefox save passwords for you so that you do not need to enter the password and username again when visiting the site at a later time. While this feature is surely comfortable and takes away the need to memorize usernames, passwords and corresponding sites plus the typing that has to be done when logging into a site it is a security risk.
Textmemos is a service that lets the user type in text messages that he wants to have delivered at a certain date and time. All that needs to be done is to enter the cell phone number, the cell phone provider, the date, time and of course the message. As of now 38 different cell phone providers are supported by Textmemos most operating in the United States and Canada with only a handful European ones.
Team Fortress 2 is an awesome game. If you are a gamer who loves sharp textures you might find the following console command for Team Fortress 2 useful. The command is mat_picmip -0.9 and has the effect that the textures in the game look much sharper than before.
Winston was asking me if I would know a way to merge one or more pdf files so that the contents of all the files would appear in one pdf file at the end. A quick research revealed a software pdftk - pdf toolkit -which can be used to merge and split pdf files. Many shareware softwares exist that do the same thing but pdftk seems to be one of the few that can merge pdf files for free.
Radiohead is a well known English rock band which was formed in 1986. They currently are under no contract with a major record label and are therefor trying to distribute their upcoming album called In Rainbows which will be released October 10, 2007 and exclusively available for purchase on an Internet website.
You might remember the technology demonstration a few weeks ago that introduced a new way of intelligently resizing images by automatically defining important and lesser important parts of the image. The results looked way better than the traditional approach which did not care about importance but reduced every aspect with the same ratio.
It sometimes might be a good idea to get a list of all installed Windows Updates on your system for administration or security purposes. WinUpdatesList is a sweet small software from one of my favorite developers NirSoft. The software lists all installed Windows Updates on your system detailing all updated files on your system.
I see a lot of parallels between Apple's iPhone and Sony's PSP. Both add new firmwares like crazy to their devices in an effort to keep device hackers at bay. Apple recently upgraded the iPhone's firmware to version 1.1.1 which made many modified iPhones inoperable.
So, you have been on holiday in that beautiful country making lots of photos but after a year you realize that you can't remember the names of most places and people that you took a picture of. Or, you have been at a family reunion or anniversary and after looking at the pictures taken you are not able to identify some of the people on the images.
If you ever wanted to be a guest in one of those famous tv shows such as Deal or no Deal, Who wants to be a Millionaire or Blockbusters. WeDigTV, the World's first TV2 Network, lets you play these shows and a couple more blending show footage with interactivity.
Most online language courses that I have tested so far do not utilize the advantages of the web at all. Those courses simply copy language courses from books. Mango is the first language course that I'm aware of that uses interactive elements to support the language course.
Joost has released yet another version of their acclaimed Internet TV client that streams prerecorded TV shows to the users computer. The new version has one feature in particular that was well overdue. Joost can now be updated from within the client. Users do not have to download and install new versions from the Joost website anymore.
Preezo is a fast powerpoint maker on the web. Like most of the web 2.0 apps it uses Ajax to power its site. To use the application you need to register and log in. The first thing I notice is there is no lag at all using the different features. It is very responsive. Even with Google Docs there is some lag while adding stuff. I would happily use this on my browser.
I'm writing this article rather excited because of what I have just seen. Panoramic photos recently started to be very popular when the first algorithms and applications for creating such images appeared and digital cameras were given support for this specific kind of shooting. Publishing such shots on Flickr or any other similar site sure is fine but I've just hit a service that serves panoramic photos in a breath-taking way.
I heavily rely on Everton from Connected Internet who sends me new interesting ways to monetize my sites from time to time. Today he was sending me a link and a short description of TNX which basically sells links on your website. Unlike other sites that sell links the links from TNX are sold on a per page basis. Every sold page earns the user points which can be either exchanged into cash or used to buy links as well.
Some images at Flickr are weakly protected with an image overlay called spaceball.gif. Whenever you right-click the image to save it you do save spaceball.gif instead which is a 1x1 pixel image showing nothing at all. The same happens if you try to drag the image to your desktop or hard drive.
If you are using Google Calendar regularly you might find this little Firefox tip interesting. It is possible to display your current and upcoming events that you added to Google Calendar in the Firefox sidebar. This is actually pretty easy to accomplish.
Source Engine games are Half-life 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike Source and others. Those games, or better part of those games, can get internally defragmented and can't be optimized using a software that defragments Windows hard drives. It is a good idea to defragment those games regularly to speed them up.
Team Fortress 2 is a great game. I play the beta regularly with some of my friends. The German version of Team Fortress 2 puts players at a serious disadvantage though. There is no blood in the game which means that German players do not know if they hit an enemy or not because the blood has simply been removed without adding some other means proof that the enemy was hit.
Poizoned Mind is an entry to the B-Game Competition held at The Independent Gaming Source which, judging from the looks of it, seems to be one of the better games of the competition. It reminds me of those classic adventures like Guild of Thieves and The Pawn which were among the first to combine text with beautiful images to support the story of the adventure.
It seems that the TV companies have finally began to understand that the Internet is more than just a way to publish their TV program on the website. They understand that it will benefit their business if they publish TV premieres early on the Internet to create some buzz that could not be created otherwise.
I wish I had a site like Notesake back then when I was at school and University, it would have saved me and my friends lots of time. Notesake is basically a group note taking online service where group of users can take and edit notes together. This is great for several reasons.
I have been writing about the stealth update that Microsoft did two weeks ago. Files in Windows XP and Windows Vista were updated without the users consent silently in the background. After some users did find out about the secret update Microsoft tried to convince everyone that the update was used to update the update routine of Windows XP and Vista.
I never thought about processing the images that I used to take with my digital camera to make them look better because I thought those softwares would not be able to improve image quality by a lot. I nevertheless tested several softwares that are supposed to improve image quality and found one sticking out: Digital Camera Enhancer.
