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
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.
Microsoft introduced the .docx file format in its new Office and Word applications and wants it to replace the commonly used doc format. The problem with the change from doc to docx is that many users are still working with prior versions of Word or no Microsoft product at all and face the problem that they can't load the docx file because it is not supported in their application.
I rarely check if updates are available for the majority of softwares that I have installed on my system. The reason behind this is simple. It takes a lot of time to check the websites of the developers - if they are known - and compare versions. I had to check for updates regularly which means that I would be occupied and could not do more important tasks. My estimation would be that it would take roughly between 6 and 10 hours a month to keep all of my software up to date.
Windows Vista in its default state needs a lot of battery power on my notebook which is why I deactivated several features like the Vista Aero theme or the sidebar when working without a power source. The free software Vista Battery Saver which is currently a beta offers a way to manage the power handling automatically.
I was just reading a long post by Steven Mansour on his website where he described how he tried to close down his account at Facebook. He still received numerous emails from Facebook after using the so called "Account deactivation" which made him wonder if his account was really gone from their system.
I have been getting lots of emails lately that have most of the time no text whatsoever but a pdf attachment with titles such as report.pdf, article.pdf or bill.pdf. Those are real pdf files and if you open them you see that they contain - you guessed it already did not you - spam.
I'm really happy that I decided to buy a Nintendo Wii. It is the ideal system if you like to play games with 1-3 friends instead of playing them alone. I was very interested in the E3 2007 announcements for the Nintendo Wii and decided to write about my top picks for the Nintendo Wii that come out this year.
It has been a long time since I mentioned the last website that offered hundreds of wallpapers in various resolutions and I thought it would be nice to add another great site to the list. Wallpaperstock is a website with a large variety of wallpapers that are offered in several resolutions and categories.
Rainbow Folders is a sweat little freeware for Windows which lets you colorize selected folders. The software has a size of roughly 600 Kilobytes and does not need to be installed at all. Just run it from the location that you unpacked it to. The application offers a folder browser on the left side and several options to change the selected folder on the right.
Nifty Windows is a compilation of dozens of Autohotkey scripts in one application that are all aimed at providing the user with a better way of interacting with windows. The compilation offers 28 new ways to interact with the user interface of Windows by using either hotkeys or the mouse.
Have you ever had the feeling that someone was looking over your shoulder to see what sites you were visiting at the moment ? The currently active site might be a harmless one but the text of the tabs that are open as well might reveal something that you would love to keep secret.
Traffic Shaper XP is a free software that is able to limit the upload and download speed of your applications and ports. This is done by creating rules similar to those known from software firewalls. You select a network adapter, choose if the rule limits upload, download or both, select a protocol and specify local and remote ports.
Some of my friends still use Outlook because they need the excellent calendar functionality and I'm forced to live with it at work as well. I guess a lot of other users have to work with Outlook as well that is why I thought it would be a nice idea to write about the software Advanced Security for Outlook.
I have been writing about the sweet little tool Junctions before but it got somehow lost among more popular articles back then and I decided to give it another try. A Directory Symbolic Link is a link from another drive or directory to an existing directory. NTFS Junctions could be used for instance to access the folder d:\mp3 from a symbolic link in c:\mp3.
I sparsely enjoy screensavers on my computer because I tend to prefer to turn of the monitor if I take a longer break. Another reason is that I did not find a good looking lightweight screensaver that I could install on my desktop pc. That is, until I read about Flurry in the excellent Donation Coder forum.
Several readers have been asking how they would be able to play movies with the flv extension. Those flash videos do not play normally in standard programs such as Windows Media Player but there are a handful of great alternative video players that support flv files out of the box.
You have to hurry if you want to grab the game Space Interceptor because it is a budget game which is available for free today at the Game Giveaway of the day website. The normal price of the game is $19.99 and you can download it free today without registering somewhere or giving away personal information.
Stick is a nice little freeware application for Windows that is able to add several tabs to the top of the screen each with its own functionality. The tabs are fully customizable and can contain any of the following five functionalities: Notes, Calendar, RSS Feeds, Calculator and Navigator tabs.
The article Free Music List December 2005 was a very successful article back in 2005 and I finally found the time to update the article with new sites and get rid of links to sites that do not exist anymore. Most of the sites listed below allow downloads even for non registered users, several ask you to register after downloading some albums and some require a registration before you can start to download or stream music.
The autopatcher team finally managed to update all of their update packages for Microsoft operating systems to July 2007 which means that you can download all patches that Microsoft has released for your operating system and apply them at once instead of using automatic updates or connecting to a Microsoft server at all.
Let me ask you a short question: Do you know how many PSA - Public Service Announcement - ads are displayed every day on your website ? You might not be able to answer this question even though you are running Google Adsense. The reason is simple. Google is not displaying stats about PSAs.
Lets say you got this nice little word document from a friend or colleague and stumble upon a word or words -like obiter dictum - that you do not know. How would you normally look it up ? You either pick up a dictionary or fire up your browser and search on the Internet for a definition of the word. This does not slow you down that much if it is only one word but what if there are more of them ? It could really slow you down unless you find a better way to lookup those words.
I normally do not have to create a lot of thumbnails, maybe one or two per day for my articles but that is it. I use GIMP for the purpose, definitely not the best choice because of the long loading times but good enough for the few that I have to create. Sometimes however I'm in the position to create thumbnails of hundreds of images and there is no way to create them with GIMP because it would take a very long time.
After reading the BBC report about broadband prices in 30 of the most developed countries I was wondering how much you actually paid for your connection to the Internet. The BBC article unfortunately revealed only marginal information and not the complete list of prices in all of the countries examined.
Seeqpod offers two ways to find new and exciting music. The first is the so called PodCrawler which constantly displays songs that have been found and added to the database. From what I can tell they are crawling official band and company websites as well as podcasts and probably other websites as well.
Did you know that it is possible to patch the firmware of many devices with an unofficial version that could increase the speed of a device or increase it's functionality ? Most firmwares are created for one of the following five device types: Motherboards. Dvd Recorders. Digital Cameras. Graphic Cards and Routers.
I got a new Nokia N73 with a USB cable recently and have been searching for games and applications that I could download without charge and install on my new mobile phone. I have never put much thought into this sector before mainly because of my laziness and an old phone that had no data cable.
A new version of FairUse4WM hit the Internet two days ago which is able to strip the DRM - that is Digital Rights Management - right of music files that use MS DRM IBX components up to version 11.0.6000.6324. So, if you own a Zune, use the Yahoo music service, Urge or several other services you might want to give FairUse4WM a try and get rid of the DRM in the music.
Optimizing a computer to improve performance while keeping everything stable is something that I really like to do. The first thing that I do when I get a new computer is to get rid of useless softwares and take a look at system settings to find ways to improve them.
Firefox is still on the rise in Europe where it reached an impressive overall 27.8% market share in June 2007. Finland, Slovakia and Slovenia lead the pack with 45.4%, 40.4% and 47.9% market share while Great Britain, Spain and Italy still linger at the bottom with a market share below 20%.
You can download and install many Firefox extensions that display a preview image or text of a link on the Internet. There are also several scripts for webmasters to enable the feature by default on their websites. Archer, who is a regular reader of my blog, send me a link to a new Firefox extension called Interclue which provides a better way of previewing links in Firefox.
After a few months of using Launchy and Rocket Dock I realized that I actually did not use the startmenu of my Windows operating system at all. I either use these great apps that give me more flexibility and speed or use icons on my desktop for certain tasks.
Another reason why I'm not using the startmenu anymore is that it really looks and feels messy after a while because every new application adds it's own folder to it. The question that came up for me is whether I needed the startmenu at all.
I'm using a sweet little freeware for some time now on Windows XP that tabs normal windows giving my desktop a clean look most of the time while still giving me access to all the folders that I need to work with at that time. I got used to it pretty quickly and thought that it would be a great way to expand this behavior to applications as well.
Liberated Films is a movie plattform that brings independent film makers and film enthusiasts together on a single website. Independent film makers get a lot of exposure from the central plattform while viewers are able to enjoy more than 9000 films that are currently hosted on site.
I think every Windows user experienced an error message like "Could not find xxx.dll" before and wondered what the hell happened with that dll. One reason could be that you used to uninstall a program that asked specifically whether you would like to remove the xxx.dll as well because it could still be needed by other applications.
Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist was an adventure in four acts created by Al Lowe, the creator of the Leisure Suit Larry series, for Sierra On-line back in the days when adventures were one of the hottest genres on the planet. This game is a usual Sierra On-line with stunning graphics, sounds and a point system that rewards you for puzzles solved (and gets you crazy if you miss some points and can't find the way to get them).
