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
Microsoft tried to enhance Windows XP by adding a central folder for user data which is called MyDocuments which is the default place for save games, pictures, music and everything else that is user related. The default location has some disadvantages though. First, it adds another folder that has to be backed up if you do backup your data regularly.
I have been working with the ftp client Filezilla for some time now and switched to release candidate three of the new and upcoming Filezilla 3 just recently. I have to use ftp clients on a daily basis to upload files to my websites and edit php and html files that are already on them. They are indeed useful for webmasters but on a decline when you take a look at all Internet users - my opinion but supported by the fact that most modern browsers support ftp downloads as well.
It has been a while since I posted the first part of this mini series entitled 10 Freeware Recommendations. Two months are a long time considering that I write about software almost every day here at Ghacks, that is why I decided to open my treasure trove again and present you another batch of freeware recommendations for Windows that will probably make your day.
As part of the ongoing celebration of the 12th anniversary of the Command and Conquer series EA decided to make the game Command and Conquer Gold freely available to the community. Both iso images - one for GDI and one for NOD - that are available on the official website and numerous other download sites have a size of about 550 Megabyte and are fully compatible with Windows XP.
I remember when the Hero Quest boardgame came out. We, some friends and I, immediately grabbed a copy of the game and began to play it several weekends in a row creating our own adventures after a while.
NBC recently tried to raise the price that users had to pay for one tv show episode from $1.99 to $4.99 which was rejected by Apple. NBC then decided to stop offering shows on iTunes and accusations were ping-ponged between both parties.
Web Messengers that allow you to connect to Instant Messenger networks are becoming extremely popular because they make it possible to connect to those networks and chat with your buddies and contacts from computers that where it is not possible to install Instant Messenger software. Meebo was one of the first Web Messengers that I wrote about and Koolim is a comparable service which has the advantage that it is not that popular yet.
Most textfields or textareas on websites accept only text input. Even more advanced textareas like those that Bloggers use to write articles offer only a handful of options and the webmaster needs to know a fair share of html to be able to arrange the text the way he wants. Ever tried to have an image on the left side and float the text around it ? This can't be done with Wordpress unless you use the float command explicitly.
It happens from time to time that folders are not deleted when uninstalling software in Windows. It can also happen that other applications move data and leave folders intact in the process. This happend to me when I used a new mp3 tagging software that moved all my mp3 files to a new directory leaving the old folders empty.
Have you ever wanted to improve your website by adding widgets that would provide some kind of interesting or important information about local weather, time, events, news or whatever else that might benefit your website without the need to write the code yourself or make a third-party script work on your own site?
Ebay Sniper tools give users the edge over those who do not use them. It takes just a fraction of a second to bid on an item using eBay Sniper softwares while it usually takes between 5-10 seconds if you bid on an item manually. These tools are usually configured to make a bid just a second or two before the auction ends making it impossible for manual bidders to place another bid before the auction ends.
Ghouls and Ghosts was the second game in the Ghosts and Goblins series by Capcom. The story was recycled from the first part of the series: You are the shiny knight Arthur who is on a quest to restore souls stolen by Lucifer including the soul of the princess Prin Prin who happens to be your bride.
If you want to show of your Windows Experience Rating in Windows Vista which displays a hardware rating of your computer but have a rather weak score you should consider tweaking the results to get a better score displayed at the end. The Experience Rating is derived from five subscores which are: Processor, Memory, Graphics, Gaming Graphics and Primary Hard Drive.
I encountered a problem in Firefox after installing the Piclens extension. My Bookmarks toolbar was not showing my bookmarks anymore, just a blank toolbar. It was also not possible to add new bookmarks to it. A quick check of my bookmarks revealed that the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder was still there so it had to be a different problem.
Piclens is a great Firefox extension that adds image viewer capabilities to Firefox. It adds a full screen display on supported sites showing the selected image plus all other images in a thumbnail bar at the bottom. The extension does not work on all sites but on some major ones such as Flickr, Facebook, Google Images, Yahoo Images, Friendster, Picase Web Albums and RSS Media Feeds.
I see a lot of file hosting recommendations lately for files that are larger than 1 Gigabyte and I was always wondering why the writers thought that this was the best way to share those files. Uploading large files to a file hoster has several advantages - but also disadvantages - which I would outline in the following paragraphs.
I have been using Norton products in the past and was always astonished how resource hungry those products were. They surely looked professional which was the main reason why I did install them but they slowed down the system and were really hard to remove from the system.
Reports have been flooding the web that the network transfer speed of Windows Vista drops to a low level when the user plays music at the same time. While there does not seem to be a obvious connection between network transfers and sounds being played and everyone would probably consider other possibilities first it seems that a service called MMCSS, the Multimedia Class Scheduler Service.
I have written several times about the Autopatcher project which was basically providing users with the opportunity to download one executable file that contained all official patches for their Microsoft operating system. This method had a lot of advantages over downloading patches from Microsoft servers: You would save bandwidth if you had to apply the patches to more than one operating system and did not have to rely on the automatic updates website to select the patches.
Companies try everything to reduce labor costs to a minimum by automating, which simply means replacing humans by computers, and outsourcing, which means producing in countries with lower labor costs, processes. The ideal world for them is a world without labor costs at all to maximize profits and please the shareholders.
I bought a lot of games, dvds and cds in the last 25 years and have a rather large collection at home. I also lend media to friends and sometimes forgot about it for a couple of months or even years until my friend brought it back to me. Using a software to organize all my books, games, CDs and DVDs was never a top priority in my life because it would literally take ages to add all of my items into the software.
I would have never thought that a company like Sony would not learn from its mistakes especially after the first rootkit debacle which was a major public relations fiasco for Sony. The first rootkit was placed on several audio CDs that were distributed in 2005 and led to a $6 million settle case in the United States. While the rootkit was intended to make it impossible (albeit ineffectively) to copy music from the CDs it was effectively used by producers of malware, trojans and spyware to hide their code from antivirus software.
It is important to know what to do if your Internet Service Provider decides to throttle or block certain ports that are used by applications that use the Bittorrent protocol. Comcast recently started using an application called Sandvine which uses a new way to throttle or block traffic. Sandvine uses something that is called session management which basically limits the number of open connections on your computer without caring about ports and protocols for instance.
When you normally download a video from the Usenet you do the following. You fire up your Newsreader, download the files, unpack them and watch the movie in your favorite movie player. NZB Player offers a different solution which is great especially for small nzb files that point to a video file directly. The player streams nzb files that you load into it from the Usenet directly which is nice for preview reasons and if you want to use a shortcut to view the video.
From time to time, you might want to check whether the contents of certain websites have changed since the last time you visited them.This could be lots of work if you intend to check them out manually and a tool, that would check websites automatically would be really handy in this situation. Especially if we are talking about dozens or even hundreds of websites and not just a handful.
We had two reports last week that gave us the reason why DRM and WGA will fail in the long run. The first story was about Google Video who sold videos with DRM and closed down their service leaving everyone who purchased those videos standing in the rain because it will not be possible to play those videos after Google Video shuts down.
I read a very interesting comment from Roman Sharp in my article that explained how to automatically terminate hung applications in Windows XP. He recommended the software Process Lasso and guess what, it was a great recommendation.
Process Lasso can probably be described as a application that manages processes. This is however not a task manager replacement but a software that can be configured to automatically react in certain situations.
I sometimes try to write articles at work and run into problems when I want to add images to the article and have to resize the images to make them fit into my website. We only have Microsoft Paint at work which is crap if you want to resize images and save them in a compressed format which means that I have to rely on online services to complete the task.
Windows can really sometimes annoy the hell out of me. Starting a new software that was recently installed and seeing it hang after the start with delayed reactions from the system can be really painful. Hitting CTRL + ALT + DEL and waiting minutes before the dialog pops up is not the number one solution to get rid of a process that is stuck in nirvana.
The game for this weekend is called The Jeluvian Project which is a tactical top down shooter with nice visuals and a compelling storyline. The Jeluvian Project is a game that takes time to master and the excellent tutorial helps you understand game mechanics and prepares you for the real battles that lie ahead.
Google Earth is a interesting application not only for geographers but also for everyone else who is interested in the earth. All the addons that are available for it make it a great experience to learn more about the earth. The sky is the limit, that's what Google probably thought when they decided to add the Sky - that's the blue thingy above your head with all the shiny stars - to Google Earth.
It does not happen very often that I see a demonstration of a new technique and say something like "Wow, give it to me, NOW!" immediately after it finishes. This is one of the times that it actually happened. The real problem with images on websites is that they are more or less static. The webmaster selected a size for the image and this is the size that you see when you visit the page and it does not matter if you have a very small screen or a big one.
I have been using two methods to create pdf documents lately and made the decision to stick with one of them after evaluating both of them. Creating pdf documents is not something that I have to do on a daily basis but it was always a rather complicated process because I did not want to purchase a professional version of Adobe Acrobat only to create a handful of documents each year.
Sauerbraten Summer Edition is an ego shooter that was created with the Open Source engine Cube 2. The game features single- and multiplayer game modes and looks incredible if you consider that this is an Open Source project and not a commercial one. The single player part of the game reminds me a little bit of games like Serious Sam and the original Quake games.
Reducing the bandwidth costs of my mobile phone is one of my top priorities in this month. You might remember that I used my Nokia N73 as a modem to go online during my summer vacation which did cost me more than $400 for just a few hours of going online and writing articles. It was quite a shock that I was charged this much because I did ask O2 support how much it would cost me and they gave me a different answer at that time.
The Internet community has been pestered with yet another wave of spam mails containing fake membership information and e-cards. The spammers use two attack vectors if you click on the ip that is listed in those emails. They try to convince you to download a so called Secure Login Applet which is nothing more than an infected executable named applet.exe and also try to use several known exploits.
Many users do not like to use the Adobe Reader because of its slow loading time which is mainly caused by the many plugins that are loaded. It seems to take ages until Adobe Reader initializes itself and displays the pdf document that one wanted to view.
The war between HD-DVD and Blue-Ray entered a next stage with the announcements of Paramount and Dreamworks to publish their lineup exclusively on HD-DVD. Rumors soon spread around the Internet that both companies were receiving payments (Paramount $50 million dollars, Dreamworks $100 million dollars) from HD supporters to make this decision.
The Autopatcher team seems to be back on track with the release of core and update Autopatcher files for Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 Server. Additionally, and for the first time, Autopatcher files for Office 2002, 2003 and 2007 have been released as well.
Don't you hate it when someone sends you an email containing links or other email addresses that are so long that your email program uses several lines to display them ? This is apparently a matter of how the email client in question is handling urls and emails that are to long to be displayed in one line.
