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
Oh Sony, when will you learn that manipulating the public will not be taken lightly when it becomes public. This time, someone from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe's studios in Liverpool was caught adding a sentence to the Halo 3 entry on Wikipedia. The person in question added the sentence 'Although it won't look any better than Halo 2' to the game description which has been removed after discovery.
I'm one of those who always wants to find the perfect gift for people that I care about which usually takes some time to think about. My usual approach is that I listen carefully and make mental notes whenever I hear something, a desire or wish, that makes the perfect gift.
Democracy at it's finest I would say. The project My Football Club has the goal to raise enough money to buy a real world football club in the United Kingdom. Every member pays an annual fee of £35 which in turn gives him an equal share in the football club. All important management decisions such as buying and scouting new players and team selection are democratically decided by counting all member votes with each member having exactly one vote.
Paying $0.99 for a single Ringtone is way to much especially if you already bought the song from iTunes or have it available on CD or as mp3.The funny thing is that Apple introduced a new format for ringtones with the extension .m4r which is simply a renamed .aac file which are the files that you download when you make a purchase at iTunes.
Retroshare is a secure Instant Messenger with File Sharing options. It uses a 2048-bit RSA encryption keys in combination with trust style authentication to ensure maximum security. Connections are only established to friends who received your Retroshare certificate which is of course a little bit more complicated but it is well worth it.
The IT Crowd is one of the best British comedy series ever produced. It's up to the point, uses nerdy characters that remind me of many of my work colleagues.The IT Crowd is about three guys - actually two guys and their female boss - from the IT appartement and their daily life in the office.
If there is one thing for sure it is that spammers are creative in finding new ways to bypass anti spam filters. They send distorted pictures, add random text to their messages, zip their spam, use excel files, pdf files and nowadays fdf files. Fdf files ? What's that again ?
Gili over at Connected Internet compiled a list of 15 applications that he calls the best free software for your computer. We all know that it can be quite difficulty to compile a list with the best because the best is nothing more than a personal judgment. I would agree that about half of the recommended softwares are must haves while the other half are nice to have but not really required.
I recently received the error message "The associated helper application does not exist" whenever I tried to download - and run - a torrent file from within Firefox. The associated helper application is a third party application that is either added to the download actions list be default or when a user is selecting to always open a file type with an application.
Do you love both episodes of the Max Payne game ? Did you also enjoy playing old Sierra classic adventures such as Gabriel Knight 2 and Phantasmagoria which can be best described as interactive movies ? You will enjoy playing Fate by Numbers if you answered both questions with yes.
If you are a big Halo fan you surely would like to download four Halo 3 wallpapers and one Halo 3 ringtone for Windows Mobile devices directly from Microsoft. All Windows Mobile devices with touch screens (Pocket PCs) and without touch screen (Smartphones) are supported.
You decided to export your Outlook data to a new computer only to realize that all Outlook categories have not been exported. Instead of manually creating those categories again you decided to search for a solution to backup the categories on the old computer and add them again to the new pc.
Frozen iPods are more common than you might think. Read on before you go out and buy a new iPod just because you can't get your old one fixed. As I said, frozen iPods are common and there are a few steps that you can undertake that will most likely fix the iPod and get it out of it's frozen state.
Apple once again announced a new batch of iPod devices to lure consumers in the trap of buying just another iPod that can store more Gigabytes, is smaller or offers a touch screen interface. High-End users have the choice between a 8 and 16 Gigabyte iPod Touch which looks pretty similar to the iPhone but ships without phone capabilities or between a 80 and 160 Gigabyte iPod Classic device.
Nec announced the Lavie C series of notebooks recently which are basically standard notebooks with one features that makes them stick out from the rest. The new feature is called 'Face Pass' which is a biometric system that uses face recognition instead of passwords to grant access to the notebook.
Windows Vista does have some nice features that are a great addition but not enough to justify a purchase. That is why clever software coders stepped in and implemented those features for Windows XP. XP has the major advantage that it is a fairly stable system that is not as resource hungry as Windows Vista is.
NBC wants more control on pricing and usage restrictions while Apple did not want to give in which is why the current relationship between those two is a little bit icy and it remains unclear if NBC shows will still be available in iTunes at years end. Meanwhile Amazon and NBC announced that NBC's tv shows will be made available on Unbox.
How many good tech blogs are out there ? What would you guess ? I'm always astonished to discover a new blog that I never heard before only to realize that I must have living behind the moon to not know it. This happens quite frequently and I add new blogs daily to my ever expanding list of feeds in Netvibes.
Until now it was possible to use the public id of any Adsense webmaster and place it on bogus sites to get the account of that webmaster banned. The public id is visible when viewing the source code of a website that uses Google Adsense to monetize.
Data synchronization is one of the most important features of software that you have to use on more than one computer. If a software does not provide a way to synchronize data between computers users normally find a way and use applications that synchronize folders and files automatically.
Would you play ad supported games if they were free ? I think the main question that has be to answered before you can give me an answer is the way the ads are displayed. Are they only shown during startup or ingame as well ? This is unfortunately a question that I can't answer right now but I can post links to some ad supported games by Ubisoft - full versions of course.
Wordpad offers an advanced functionality in comparison to Notepad but is not able to compete against Office suites such as Open Office or Microsoft Word. Ultra-Pad is a Wordpad replacement for Windows which adds several features that Wordpad does not offer. It can be enhanced with themes for instance, an option that Wordpad does not offer.
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.
