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
The distribution of ringtones for mobile phones is a very lucrative business if you consider that there are more than 3 billion mobile phones out there in the world. You can buy ringtones of every popular song in existence but it is rather hard to get those ringtones for free.
Toneshared is offering a large, free collection of electronic and alternative ringtones that can be downloaded right from their website. It is furthermore possible to listen to the ringtones before downloading them. Ringtones are sorted by artist, popularity and age. I don't know any of the artists mentioned on Toneshared but if you like electronic music you might probably know some of them.
The outcry of the Internet community was loud and clear when then information was published that songs purchased without DRM from Apple's iTunes store would contain the name and username of the buyer. Horror scenarios where created that suggested that someone could get convicted if his purchased songs would be found on P2P websites even if he did not share them personally.
The new version of Opera introduced a so called Speed Dial feature which displays nine thumbnails of websites for fast access that have been selected by the user. The nine websites are displayed when the user opens a new blank tab or a new blank window and can be accessed by either clicking on the thumbnails or pressing the corresponding numbers (1-9).
The exact same feature is now available as a Firefox extension Speed Dial. Websites can be assigned to the nine spots by using the "Set as Speed Dial" entry in the Bookmarks menu. This is slightly more uncomfortable than in Opera where it is possible to click one of the nine spots and select an entry from the bookmarks.
I'm not sure why someone would want to change the style of his XP installation to that of Windows Vista but it seems that the demand for this is immense. Version 7 of the Vista Transformation Package has been released yesterday which turns your ordinary XP style into one that resembles the style of Windows Vista.
Everton from Connected Internet posted a nice article where he is detailing his steps to add tags and cover artwork to his mp3 collection using a few selected freeware programs and iTunes. He suggests to use Picard for the tagging process because Picard is able to add most tags of known albums automatically.
The only information that are not added by Picard are the cover artwork and the genre. It is understandable that the genre is not being added because it is sometimes difficulty to select a genre that everyone would be comfortable with. Itunes will be used to add the cover artwork right from the iTunes store.
Firefox is not optimized for widescreen or dualscreen monitors leaving lots of empty space when surfing the Internet. Jonathon Weare came up with a solid way to change the layout of Firefox to suit the needs of widescreen monitors by moving several elements of Firefox to different positions.
His first idea was to move the bar with all the tabs from the top location into the sidebar which adds two benefits. The first benefit is that the space on the sides is used to store elements that are needed for browsing while the second is that the tab bar is removed from the top location adding more space for the actual website.
TV Links is a very comprehensive up to date website that offers links to hundreds of TV shows, movies, cartoons, anime, music videos and sport shows. The main url brings you to the listing of all available TV shows which start with all episodes of 24 and end with Zoey 101.
The popular Desktop Tower Defense game has been upgraded from version 1 to 1.5 bringing new excitement and frustration to the already excellent game. Several new enemies and towers have been included that make the game more enjoyable although I think that it did not rise in difficulty that much.
I can only talk about the medium mode that I tried today which I passed at first try and the challenge mode to beat 100 levels which is tough as always. I was not able to beat the challenge mode though, it becomes extremely difficulty at levels 75+ at least with the strategies that I have tried.
I had a good laugh when I read the article "The five most embarassing ways to die in an FPS" which describes five entertaining (for the others) and embarassing (for the one being killed) ways to die in first person shooters.
I have been playing pro level Unreal Tournament for about two years and it was always a pleasure to witness an embarassing death. Unreal Tournament however was not the only game that I was playing. I also enjoyed Quake 3 Arena, Counter Strike (Source) and many other PC shooters.
Nothing is more frustrating than to witness that the movie that you downloaded for hours won't play on your computer. Maybe there is only black screen, no audio, blurred pictures or out of sync audio and video. The most likely cause for this behavior is that a audio or video codec is missing on your system.
I did not pay much attention to the Apple iPhone hype until now but today the newest commercial for the iPhone caught my attention on Youtube. The first thing that struck my mind was that the navigation was blazing fast. As you might know a multi-touchscreen is being used for writing and navigating through menus.
It looks more like a multimedia gadget with phone capabilities than the other way round which I personally do not like that much. I like slim, fast gadgets that are not that bloated than the iPhone. I would never for instance watch Youtube videos on such a Gadget, does not make sense to me.
Starshine is a neat little browser game suitable for all ages. It is a relaxing addictive puzzle game with 50 levels. The screen consists of a outer ring that is used to fire one shooting star at neatly placed stars that send out additional shooting stars. You need to create a chain reaction to hit all stars of the level with your shooting star.
It seems that the lovely Swedes from The Piratebay are branching more and more into different Internet services. After announcing their Youtube competitor they released an uncensored image hosting service called Bayimg.
Uncensored means that it is possible to upload all kinds of pictures as long as they are legal under Swedish law which is pretty much everything imaginable. The site is blazing fast, uses a slick ajaxified interface and tags to categorize images.
It becomes more common to use two monitors at once to increase productivity. Several of my friends already have two monitors setup as dual monitors to be able to display twice the amount of information on the screen. This makes perfect sense for users who do need a lot of information on the screen at once.
I know some Poker players for instance who use two monitors to play eight games at once. It is actually pretty hard to find wallpapers for dual monitor setups. Sure, you could merge two wallpapers and use them as the background but it is also possible to use dual screen wallpapers from the site that I just found.
Turrican was one of the great plattform shooters on the Commodore 64 featuring awesome music, gameplay and graphics. It spawned numerous successful sequels and a group of enthusiasts decided to create a Turrican remake which they called Hurrican. They began working on the remake five years ago and released the final version today.
My immediate reaction to the Epoq MP4 wrist watch was that I thought that it was a really cool idea. I was not able to come up with a lot of applications for it but it looked really cool. The watch acts as a standard music and video player supporting formats such as mp3, wma and mp4.
Pictures can be viewed as well and everything can be uploaded using a normal USB 2.0 port. The mp4 wrist watch comes with different storage capacities, the largest being 2 Gigabytes of space which should be enough for lots of videos in that resolution. There is also the option to choose a widescreen lcd display instead of a normal one.
Did you know that the iPod is supporting two additional audiobook features ? Audiobooks in the m4b format support the adjustment of the reading speed and pointers to the last reading position of the audiobook. Those features are not available if your audiobooks have the extension mp3.
I saw this topic at the Connected Internet blog and thought that it would be nice to round up all the Online Services that we can't live without anymore. I'm not speaking about Email, Usenet or ICQ but websites that offer something that you really enjoy, would recommend and don't want to miss anymore.
Don't you hate it when Windows creates a new folder all the time with the name new folder ? This can be quite problematic if you have to create a number of folders in a row or during your daily routine.
The tiny software integrates itself seamlessly into the windows Explorer adding advanced folder creation options to the right-click menu of it. You can choose a combination from any of the following:
Microsoft Office introduced several new file formats which can't be read by older versions of the various Office products. I'm not sure why Microsoft decided to change the file formats but it is really a hassle for me. I'm running Office 2007 on my system while my girlfriend is still running an older version of Microsoft Office.
It happened twice already that she worked on my computer and saved a Microsoft Word format in the new format (.docx) and was not able to read the file on her computer. She does not have Internet access there which means that it was really problematic to get the right format on her computer.
Vispa is a free software that lets you change and disable many features of Windows Vista that you may not like or make use of. I'm thinking of features that phone home […]
Windows Vista Ultimate users have Dreamscene which brings video screensavers to their operating systems. Several hacked versions of Dreamscene have been published that can be installed on other Vista editions as well but not on Windows XP. Microsoft however released a video screensaver for XP in 2005 which makes me wonder why they limited Dreamscene to Vista Ultimate only.
The Microsoft Video Screensaver should work on all versions of Windows XP and includes one video from Microsoft. You can choose to use one or more of the videos located on your computer instead. You do this by pointing to a folder that contains at least one video.
Microsoft Brazilian Beaches, also called Microsoft Praias do Brasil, is a theme collection that contains four themes for Windows XP. All four do change the general appearance of Windows XP including the background image which is showing an image of a Brazilian beach with additional information attached.
If you are looking for a great mp3 search engine you should head over to Skreemr immediately. The interface looks pretty much like Google's interface. Just a search box and some links that point to some inner pages. All you need to do to get it working is enter a name of an artist, album or song and Skreemr searches its database for reference to your search string.
A search for Linkin Park revealed more than 2300 entries. Each search results page contains ten links to mp3's with information about the absolute link to the mp3, a description, name and details as well as a basic music player that connects and plays the mp3. The file size is the most important information next to the song name of course because it can be used as an indicator of the quality of the song.
I do not know why some users swear on iTunes and prefer to use it as their main software for their music collection. The biggest drawback in my opinion is that iTunes was designed to only work with iPods and not other mp3 players from different manufacturers. I personally think that it is a bit way of to install iTunes if you do not own an iPod but apparently some users are doing it.
PStart is a nice handy application that makes it easy to start applications or open folders on your portable devices. One of the main disadvantages of Windows is that it uses absolute paths in its shortcuts which becomes a big problem if a drive letter changes. A click on the shortcut to the portable version of Firefox would return a not found error message if the driver letter of the USB device changed after the creation of the shortcut.
Please note that the following article is a paid review. You can be sure that I’m only accepting reviews of products or services that I think are interesting enough to be mentioned on my website and that I would consider using myself or that I'm actually using already.
Take a look at your CD, DVD, Game or Book collection for a minute. Do you see something that you will never use again ? I bet you do. What if I was to tell you that you could trade the media that you do not need anymore against new media that you are interested in ? This is the basic concept of Switchplanet.
It is Friday again and as usual I'm writing about one great game for the weekend that will keep you occupied for hours or even days. This time it is another Tower Defense type of game. These games have become extremely popular in the online community and we will most likely see a lot of those games in the next months.
Vector TD is a better Tower Defense game. Your objective is to destroy the enemy vectors before they can reach the exit of the level. You loose one life for every vector that reaches the exit. The game ends when you have no lives left or when you beat all the levels of the game.
A word of caution before I start the article. If you are easily offended by strong language or a minor you should stop reading right now and read some other articles on my site. No Good TV is a Internet TV portal that looks and feels a lot like the Joost or Bablegum with the difference that No Good TV is a web application.
All you need is your browser to view the shows. The layout of the site is rather chaotic and it takes a while to get used to it - well, unless you like to watch MTV a lot. It really reminds me of the shows that are shown on MTV all the time these days. You can select to view various channels such as Down and Dirty, Dirty Music Videos or Reel Junkies.
The default logon screen of Windows XP looks plain and boring and many users would like to change the background image and other elements of the logon screen to have a better looking interface. There is a sweet and easy way to replace the existing logon screen with a custom one by either downloading pre-made logons or creating one by yourself.
You do need the software Stardock Logon Studio which is available for Windows XP and Windows Vista. This article concentrates on logons for Windows XP and a future article will do the same for Windows Vista.
It seems that you only need a crazy idea, record everything on video and upload it to Youtube to become famous. Five friends from France decided to record their (successful) attempts of throwing empty cans into trashbins and upload this video to Youtube.
They released two videos on Youtube. Their second one received more than 1.500.000 million views which is pretty impressive. I think one reason for the success of the two movies are that it everyone is able to try it by himself and see how difficulty it is to aim and throw the can to hit the trashbin. The videos are well done and enjoyable, have fun watching them..
Many novice users fear the technical process that has do be done before or during the installation of a Linux distribution. Partitioning is something that most are not familiar with and the fear to do something wrong and wreck their standard operating system is probably one of the main reasons why many users do not install a Linux distribution.
I'm not that interested in the HD format war because I do not have a television that is HD Ready and do not plan to buy one in the near future. Maybe that is one of the reasons why I feel a little bit lost about the success or failure of HD-DVD and Blue-Ray players and movies.
I thought that I'm going to discuss it with each of you. What are your thoughts about both formats ? Do you think that Blue-Ray is in the lead, maybe because of the boost after the release of the Playstation 3 by Sony ? Or is it the HD-DVD format that you think will win this war.
I'm sometimes wondering if the companies leak betas on purpose to create news about their upcoming products or if this is just the way it goes in the software business. A beta version of the upcoming Real Player 11 has been leaked and everyone may download it as of know from the official real website.
Speed Simulator is a nice free tool that makes it possible to see how a website behaves under certain speed limitations. This is for instance useful if you want to see how a user with a 56K modem experiences your site and especially the loading time of it. Only the download speed can be reduced to simulate slower connections.
More Tunes monitors various music players such as iTunes, Winamp and Windows Media Player and fetches information like Artist, Album, Genre and Year about songs that are currently played. The data that has been fetched can then be used to repair or edit the ID3 tags of the song and rename it as well.
The joy that Apple decided to sell DRM free music on their popular iTunes plattform was overshadowed by two elements. The first one was that the DRM free songs would cost $0.30 more which could not really be explained. The second element was discovered after users were actually able to purchase drm free songs at iTunes.
Account information, namely name of buyer and account name, remained as information in the DRM free files. While this should not be a problem for everyone some users would have at least preferred to receive information about this before making the purchases.
There are two possibilities to download binaries from the Usenet. The first one is the most common one. You download the headers of a newsgroup that you are interested in and select the files that you want to download. All of this is done in your newsclient. This method has some serious disadvantages.
You may not search through many newsgroups at once for instance or search for files in a large list of groups. Usenet indexing sites try to aid users by offering a way to search the contents of many newsgroups at once. They index new posts that appear in the observed groups and offer web interfaces that users can use to search for files.
Grooveshark is a new social music website that is currently in closed alpha stage. I was able to get an invitation to the system and would like to write about it here at ghacks and also give out some invites to Grooveshark to a handful of lucky readers.
Grooveshark works basically the following way. You start an application on your computer and decide which music folders you want to share with the community. This application has to be running in the background to be able to share and listen to the music on the Grooveshark website.
If you are looking for a universal archiv software other than 7-zip you should take a closer look at IZArc which lately replaced WinRar on my computer. The real beauty of IZArc is of course it's support of most known archiv formats such as zip, rar, 7-zip, gz, ace, tar and dozens others including formats such as iso, bin and nrg.
