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
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.
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.
