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 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.
I saw the funny picture series over at Operawatch and thought that you would like to join the laughter. It is a rather visual comparison of how Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer would look like if they would be transportation vessels.
I have seen the topic make the Digg frontpage and I was wondering why it exactly did make it. A little bit of common sense which every webmaster should have is all that is needed to know what this new spam preparation comments are all about.
If you do run a website you might have come upon comments that are posted that contain one sentence saying something unrelated but positive about the website or webmaster. Those comments can be clearly identified as spam because they do not add to the discussion or article in any way.
I always wondered which company would be able to compete with Apple's iTunes store and only a handful companies came to my mind. Besides Microsoft and eBay Amazon came to my mind. They are a established brand and I do not know a single person who does not have an Amazon account already.
A new version of Driver Max has been released just recently.Driver Max is a software to backup all your Windows system drivers to be able to import them again at a later date. The user may select the drivers that he would like to backup in case it is only some of them that he would like to have a backup of.
Who needs Windows Vistas parental control if you have all the options in Windows XP as well if you download the Microsoft software Steady State which probably was not designed with parental control in mind but with user control in general on Windows XP systems. The major benefit of Steady State is that you can create user accounts, restrict those accounts plus define that all changes made with these accounts are undone after rebooting the system.
How many bookmarking sites are out there on the web ? A few hundred for sure. They are a great way to increase backlinks to your blog and drive some traffic to it as well. Submitting your articles to those bookmarking sites however is a painfully slow process. Visiting those sites one by one, logging in, filling out the submission form takes some time and it pretty boring and repetitive.
Companies, Universities, Schools and pretty much everyone else are blocking or banning contents on the web that they deem inappropriate, questionable or distracting. The banning spree however goes sometimes to far and websites that should not be blocked are blocked as well.
I have written about a way to manually repair file type associations in Windows by using two commands and the Windows command line. While this works in most cases and is certainly faster than using a software for the matter it has its limitations.
If you would like to take a look at up to date weather forecasts and weather reports for your location you might want to take a look at the software Weather Watcher. Weather Watcher displays all the relevant information that you would expect. You can choose to display the weather forecast for one of the more than 77000 cities that are stored in the database.
What would you say if there is an easy way to reduce mobile phone SMS and call costs ? I'm using a service called Cellity for some time now and was able to reduce my mobile phone bill tremendously. I do write the occasional SMS which usually costs between €0.10 to €0.20 per SMS. Cellity reduces this to the cost of the data transfer rate of the SMS which is just a few Kilobytes the most.
Enigma, a regular visitor of my blog, asked if there was a way to stop pdf spam from appearing in his Windows Live Mail Desktop software. I decided to investigate the matter and take a look at it. Windows Live Mail Desktop is basically a mail client like Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook integrating with several other Microsoft applications such as Windows Live Messenger or Live Spaces.
Outlook blocks certain file types like exe and vbs by default giving the user no option to enable certain file types that the user would like to access. The only possible option for most users is to ask the sender to send the mail in a format that is not blocked automatically by Microsoft Outlook.
I have to regularly resize images to make them fit into my articles here at Ghacks which I used to create using a combination of a screenshot software and the image manipulation software GIMP. While this method worked flawlessly it simply took to long to start GIMP and resize the image.
What do you normally do if you want to share your screen with someone else who is not sitting in the same room ? You could use a software like Screen Stream to stream the contents of your monitor to the other person so that he would be able to see your actions on his monitor.
Last.fm does not offer an obvious option to play music streams in an external music player. It is however possible to obtain the stream url for several radio streams from last.fm and use them in your favorite music player. This is also an excellent opportunity to record those songs using that player. I do recommend XMPlay for this.
Did you ever have the problem that you wanted to change the file association of a certain file type but were not able to ? The normal way of right-clicking the filetype, clicking on Properties, then on the Change button next to the Opens With entry and browsing to the executable did not work for me because the executable was not added as the default software.
Airset is a basically an online organizer with sync functionality. It lets you create groups like work, family and gym online each with their own group members, calendar, blog, file sharing possibilities and more. Groups are color coded and can be viewed using a tabbed interface at the top of the Airset website.
That is at least the definition by us common folks who are happy to get an unlimited plan - be it Internet or mobile phone - only to find out that the fine prints are detailing lots of exclusions that turn the advertised unlimited plan into a limited one. I'm not a marketing expert nor a lawyer but this does look fishy to me.
Pressing F11 in Firefox displays the current website in full screen mode removing many of the toolbars and buttons that are not required to view a website. There is however no obvious possibility to change the appearance of the full screen view mode of Firefox.
Synaesthete is one of those trendy arena shooters that bombard the player with a splendid mixture of color and sound while keeping the game mechanism as simply as possible. The task of the player is to destroy all enemies in an level to be able to cross the bridge to the next level.
I was really looking forward to play Team Fortress 2 once it came out on October 10th and decided to read a lot of news regarding that release to be up to date. My heart began to beat like hell when I realized that it was possible to make the purchase at an discount right away and be eligible to play the Team Fortress 2 beta right away.
Media Defender, the company that is spreading fake releases to p2p networks such as edonkey or bittorrent in order to spread chaos amongst file sharers, has been hit by another devastating blow. First thousands of internal emails leaked on the Internet detailing information about fake releases, ways of spreading those releases and several other internal Media Defender internals.
One click downloads of Flickr Images have become a reality. Flickr Downloader is a software for Microsoft Windows including Windows Vista that lets you download Flickr Images with the click of the mouse button. Configuring Flickr Downloader is done in the matter of seconds.
Server operators who happen to have songs on their servers that are distributed illegally will have to pay the fine of 20000 Euro ($28000) per song: at least in Germany according to the district court in Hamburg. Private downloaders get it much cheaper though. They only have to pay 6000 Euro for the first song, 3000 for the second, 1500 for the third and 600 for all remaining ones. A cheap bargain don't you think ?
I'm currently using several tools to clean my system, change settings to increase security and privacy, control startup items and tweak system settings to improve performance. Softwares like CCleaner, Xpy, Autoruns and several others do the job just fine with the only minor issue that I have to open them if I want to change specific settings. It would be far easier to use one software to do all of those tasks.
In a place far away from reality - which happens to be somewhere near Seattle - two Star Wars geeks decided to create the ultimate home theater: A Star Wars Death Star Home Theater. It took them 36 months to complete the project which in my opinion resembles the interior of an Imperial Star Destroyer and not the Death Star.
Page Defrag is a tiny 70 Kilobyte software that displays information about how fragmented your paging files and registry hives are. Defragmenters running in Windows have no way of defragmenting those paging files and registry hives which usually means that they get fragmented over time which can degrade system performance.
Microsoft released the Office 2003 Service Pack 3 just a few hours ago which contains the latest updates for Office 2003. The pack with a size of 117 Megabytes contains 22 security patches and updates as well as the previous two service packs for Office 2003. The main emphasize of this service pack seems to be security related because 14 of the 22 updates are security related.
I know that I'm a bit late with this article but I thought I give it a try anyway. Simpsonize Me is a flash application that was created to promote the new Simpsons movie that was shown in cinemas earlier this year. What it does is that it transforms a closeup picture into a Simpsons character.
I am a big fan of flying and everything related to it and I'm excited about the job of all air traffic controllers. Among excellent knowledge of English language, this kind of work requires perfect concentration on anything that the controller does or says.
There are many stations on the internet that let you listen to voice navigation from different airports around the world almost in real-time, with just a small delay. However, at least one of these sites stands out of the crowd by providing a real-time visual summary of current situation in the air above the Atlanta airport, along with controller's speech.
I was looking for a way to start softwares at a given time of the week and found X-ecutor to be the perfect choice for that. X-ecutor actually gives you even more options that that. It allows you to start softwares at system start, shutdown and at a selected time or day.
Font Smoothing is not optimized properly on your computer. I can say that because it holds true for almost any computer that is running Windows XP using a LCD display. Windows XP offers only two ways to smooth fonts which are both deeply hidden in the system.
The XeroBrowser that I wrote about just a few hours ago is a nice software especially for inexperienced users who feel insecure when configuring security applications. Experts or users who want to control what is being installed and used on their system want to manually add security extensions to Firefox. This is probably the better approach because they know exactly what is installed on their system.
XeroBank Browser, or xB Browser which was previously called Torpark, is a portable browser based on Firefox with security and privacy add-ons that can be run out of the box. The burden of installing all those extensions and softwares and making sure that they work correctly is taken of the users hand which should appeal to many users who do not have the time or knowledge to take care of that by themselves.
More than 6500 internal emails from anti-piracy company Mediadefender have been leaked on the Internet as one big Mailbox file that can be imported into email clients. Mails give in depth information about tactics that have been used to spread fake releases, fake edonkey servers and their opinion about several bittorrent clients.
Userbars can be used to display custom messages in signatures that are displayed in forums and other places. The difficulty is creating those userbars which normally requires knowledge of image manipulation applications such as Adobe Photoshop or Gimp. There are several softwares that take that burden from the user and make it quite easy to create userbars with a few simple clicks of the mouse.
Experts are able to gather sensitive data from your computer if they gain physical access to it. This can be achieved by various means like Live CDs, accessing unprotected accounts or administrators that take a look in your profile folders. They can search the files on your hard drives, read documents, look at your Internet cache, the mailboxes which contain all of your mails - even the deleted ones - and histories of downloaded files.
