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 was planing to run some benchmarks on my website with various settings to find a result that would reduce loading time for my website for every visitor. I had one script and one plugin in mind that I wanted to test. The first one was the Google Analytics script which I used to be able to access site statistics on the Google Analytics website while the second was the wp-cache plugin for Wordpress which cached database requests but required that gz compression was disabled which resulted in a larger html file that was transferred to each visitor.
Power Off is a freeware for Microsoft Windows that makes it easy to control the power state - that is on, off, standby and so on - on a local or remote computer. You could for instance configure it to set a certain power state when a process ends or scheduled for a day or time.
Privacy should be a major concern for everyone on the Internet these days. You would be surprised what search engines such as Google know about you - well, not really about you unless you have a real name account with them and are logged in when performing searches.
P5chin who is a regular reader of my blog send me a tip which I immediately had to write about. I don't know a single computer user who is not unhappy with all the cables, power sources and external devices cluttering the place on and beneath the desk.
If you have to use Microsoft Outlook on more than one computer you might want to keep the data synchronized to be able to work with the latest emails. This is something that can't be accomplished in Outlook which means that we have to rely on third party tools to synchronize the mails between several Outlook installations.
Netflix, a online movie rentals company, is offering a so called 'Watch Now' service since the beginning of 2007 which allows subscribed users to watch streaming movies. This offer lets you watch x hours of movies where x is the amount that you pay in dollars for your monthly subscription.
A friend of mine installed Linux next to Windows XP a few weeks ago and did not like it that much and decided to get rid of it. The problem that he faced was that the Linux bootloader was still showing up when he started his system. He was not able to figure out what to do about it and asked me if I knew a way to remove the Linux bootloader from his system so that Windows XP would start immediately.
Firefox 3 codename Gran Paradiso will most likely leave alpha phase in September. The release of Gran Paradiso alpha 7 could be the last alpha version and I decided to take a look and see what we can expect in the new version. The first thing that I noticed when starting the new Firefox release was the incredible speed.
Thunderbird, the email client from the Mozilla team, was in the news just a few days ago with the announcement that a separate Thunderbird will receive an independent organizational setting allowing the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.
Would you be able to write down the serial number of your Windows operating system if I would ask you to do it ? Or of Microsoft Office ? This is normally not a problem because you have the serial number in written form and can look it up if it is needed. But what if you can't find it anymore because it somehow got lost during the last move ?
Windows 7, the new Microsoft operating system, is still at least three years away but that fact did not seem to bother Deviant Art member Long Z who created an unofficial but great looking Windows 7 wallpaper. Windows 7, which was codenamed Vienna before, is just another codename of course and we will most likely experience another name change in the future.
Slickr is a Open Source screensaver for Flickr which gives the user a multitude of possibilities to display images which are pulled from Flickr in realtime. The only real hassle that could get into your way is that Slickr requires a Flickr api key to work. Everyone with a Yahoo account can get one without problems though.
What happens if your antivirus or antispyware software does not detect a malicious application ? One of the things that will most likely happen is that the malicious application will add itself to the system startup most likely in the registry to make sure it is always executed when the system starts.
I read several Fighting Fantasy books when I was younger and it was always pure excitement because it was possible to direct the story in a certain way. Let me explain the principle if you have never heard about Fighting Fantasy before. The books were about 400 pages in size telling a fantasy story that reminded of Dungeons and Dragons or Tolkien books.
I always thought it would be nice to put the camera that most mobile phones are equipped with to got use and have a software that would make it possible to take a picture of a document and fax or send it to someone using the same phone. I don't have a fax because I rarely need it but I miss it dearly whenever I need it.
Modchips are evil and are the main reason that the game developers are making less money than they should. This is the number one argument against modchips brought forth by a phalanx of game developers, Industry lobbyists and government officials. The question remains if this holds true or if there are other motives behind using modchips on video game systems.
I really like my new mobile phone which is a Nokia N73 Music Edition. There is however one disturbing thing and that is a blue light that is blinking whenever my phone is activating sleep mode. Sleep mode is great because it consumes less battery when it is active but that blinking blue light is really getting on my nerves.
Did you know that the latest version of Wordpress contains at least seven security vulnerabilities that could compromise your blog ? If you use Wordpress you should make sure that to fix them as soon as possible. The easiest way to fix them right now is to use the first Wordpress worm - which is a good one - to fix all seven vulnerabilities for you.
I can't rememeber the name of the song but it goes something like this.. If you ever have been in a situation where you were not able to remember the name of the song that you heard either because it was played on radio or a song of the past you should check out the new service Midomi to get a good chance to discover the songs name.
Hotlinking is a technique that is frowned upon on the Internet. This happens if you upload a file to your webserver and someone else links to that file directly effectively using your bandwidth to display and / or spread the file on his website. This happens most often with images but it could also be happening with all other files such as zip or pdf.
There are not many features that the Internet Explorer posses that Firefox users have to be jealous about. The image toolbar which is the popup that appears when you hover the mouse over an image to be able to quickly access the most used image commands could be one of the features that you would like to see implemented in Firefox as well.
July has passed pretty quickly for me with two vacations and it was a rather unspectacular month in regards to ghacks as well. My earnings remained pretty stable throughout the month with the usual fluctuation in Adsense earnings. I'm really not sure why the difference between the worst day (Saturday, July 14, 2007 - 2,44% of my Adsense earnings) and the best day (Sunday, July 15, 2007 - 3,97% of my Adsense earnings) was so immense considering that the best day followed the worst day immediately.
Drivers that have not been removed from the system after uninstalling the device and software can have a serious impact on system stability. You could for instance be in a world of trouble if you have been using a Ati card and Ati drivers and switched to a Nvidia card and drivers. Driver leftovers could affect system performance and be the reason for crashes and bluescreens.
I'm sometimes surprised by the release of an excellent game created by independent developers. You can tell that those developers love their games which is probably the number one difference between games from companies who earn a living from developing them.
Several of my friends rely heavily on the excellent Calendar function in Microsoft Outlook to organize their work routine. The Outlook Calendar does have a serious disadvantage if you compare it to a normal paper calendar though because it is not visible all the time. A paper calendar is always visible and Outlook does not offer this functionality unless you use Michael Scrivo's Outlook Desktop application.
Microsoft released a preview of an upcoming Vista Performance and Reliability Pack to its beta testers while everyone else will have to wait until August, the 14.th to download the pack. That is, unless you have read the Neowin announcement which linked to download locations for the Vista Performance and Reliability Pack for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista.
AIM, which is short for AOL Instant Messenger, is one of the popular Instant Messengers with more than 53 million active users. Only Jabber comes close to this numbers while other popular clients such as MSN have only half of that active user base. One big problem with AIM is the integration of advertisements and bundled software which is not needed to run AIM at all.
I'm in the mood for some funny pictures and thought that it could be nice to create a series of threads every Sunday from now on. If you like the idea to read a post with links to funnny videos, pictures and audio files let me know.
The article about working with multiple rar files at once was highly productive if you consider that I was able to write two more articles from links that have been posted in the comments of it. Extract Now is a software that has one main purpose and that is to extract multiple files at once.
I love it when someone mentions a great software or tip in the comments of one of my articles. Mouser from Donation Coders mentioned his program Drag and Drop Robot in my article that explained how to unrar multiple rar files at once. It is basically a more versatile software that has - amongst others - the functionality to unrar multiple files.
Extracting multiple independent rar files did take some time in the past until I found out how to do this with just a few clicks of the mouse. The rar files should be in the same directory for this method. Just mark all rar files, right-click the marked area and select to uninstall all files in this location.
In case you are wondering; I'm talking about computer RAM. I noticed a few days ago that one of the 512 Megabyte bars of RAM that I had installed on my computer was faulty and decided to order two 1 Gigabyte bars to replace both old bars. I had the hopes that the increase would also speed up some resource intensive applications.
This is probably not the best hack in life but it is still valid and working. You could use the ringtones for other mobile phones as well if you convert the m4p extension to a format that your mobile supports. The principle of grabbing song samples and use them as your iPhone ringtones is pretty simple.
Fichey finally offers a new approach for the crowded web 2.0 community by giving everyone access to the back catalogue of popular social news and bookmarking websites such as Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon. This is just one approach of Fichey but the most important one.
The year is 1999. Two shooters are competing for the crown of the ultimate shooter. Their names: Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena. I have to admit that I fell in love with Unreal Tournament and did not play Quake III Arena that much which was still a good game but not that good, hehe.
One of my readers Rico posted a link to the excellent Hyperwords extension for Firefox in the comments of my article about the Easy Gestures extension and I was heading out immediately to take a look and see if the extension was really that good as he claimed it to be. I know that many of my readers have some gems up their sleeves that they seldom share but when they do I'm often in for a surprise.
It has been a few months since I used Joost for the last time and I thought it would be a good time to take another look at Joost considering the announcement that they would go live at the end of the year with almost one million beta testers. A post at the Cybernet Blog also called my attention where Ashley asked if someone was actually still using Joost.
It you purchase new ram, a new or used computer or experience crashes and bluescreens you should definitely test the memory installed on your computer to make sure that it is running without errors. Faulty memory is one of the main reasons for instability. The first task should be to make sure that the memory is correctly inserted into the memory banks. Make sure you count the number of bars and check if you are running dual channel mode or not.
World Display is a free wallpaper locater and changer for Microsoft Windows that offers several ways to find wallpapers. The main feature of World Display is to display beautiful locations of the world as your background in Windows. You can use the build in Google Maps tool to browse to interesting locations, preview the images available and add the location to your selection or the preview image to your favorites.
Easy Gestures is in my opinion one of the best Firefox extensions comparable to great extensions such as Greasemonkey or Adblock Plus. The Easy Gestures extension gives you access to commands that can be performed with mouse gestures, to be more precise with a simple mouse click and click on the desired action. Almost everything can be customized.
