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
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.
You should take a look at the Media Convert online script if you want to quickly convert an audio or video file into another format without installing a software like Super or Media Convert on your computer. The online script is able to convert files from urls or from your computer with a maximum size of 150 megabytes.
The input format is automatically detected if you chose to upload it from your computer while you have to select the format for the url links by yourself. Various output formats exist that can be selected. The list of available audio and video formats is long and all popular formats are supported.
I have been trying several newsreaders for the Usenet until I finally found the one and only newsreader Newsbin. I purchased it years ago and can only recommend it to everyone else who is serious about the Usenet. I do know however that some users prefer free software and that is why I took a look at the Pan newsreader which is available for Windows, Mac and Unix.
Pan Newsreader is offering a lot of features that commercial Usenet readers such as Newsbin are offering as well. It does support download binaries of course offering single-click encoding, multiple connections and simultaneous downloads and image previews of downloaded images.
I first read about Trimark at the Torrent Freak blog. This new anti-piracy solution targets websites and the Usenet by scanning the contents for serial numbers that have been implemented into the music files. An identified serial number would lead to the owner - the person that purchased the music - who will be held reliable for the damages caused by the spreading.
The article did not contain information about the technology behind Trimark other than that the "identification code maintains it’s integrity, despite copying or ripping." This is a very bold statement and I personally don't think that such a system will be possible unless they implement it in music that can be purchased in digital form only.
We all know that Microsoft has decided to make the latest version of DirectX 10 Windows Vista only most likely to drive more sales to the new operating systems. Some independent developers have decided to create a working version of DirectX 10 for Windows XP with the goal to run any application that requires DirectX 10 also on that operating system.
The current release is a alpha release and probably only interesting for developers or coders. The plan is however to support the two games that have been released for Vista only. Halo 2 and Shadowrun are the two games that can only be installed and played using Windows Vista at the moment.
Seadragon and Photosynth are two new technologies that have been presented at the TED 2007 conference by it's architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas. Seadragon is basically a way to navigate seamlessly through a very large amount of image data. He was giving three examples at the presentation.
First he introduced a 300 Megapixel image, then that he was able to zoom into a complete book and lastly that it was possible to create new types of ads that would allow to zoom in and reveal details that would not be possible otherwise.
When I was a child I played Risk many times with my friends. I could not get enough of this game. We even created our own house rules to make the game more exciting. I have been playing JRisk every now and then since it was released and think that it is a nice Risk clone with some great features.
What I really like about is that you have the choice to either download it or play it on the developers website. You do need Java to play the game but this should be installed on most computers anyway. The version that can be downloaded should be best suited for most users because it plays definitely faster and has an option to save and load games.
I would like to share a really nice and easy way to rip any kind of audio from videos and save the audio in mp3 format. This is a great way of adding music to your collection for instance or to get podcast like shows by ripping the audio from documentations or other videos.
Genbeta are reporting that you can get a free version of the Divx Pro suite for a limited amount of time. All you need to do is go to Windows download or Mac download and download the divx pro software. You are asked for an email address during installation which will be used to send the Divx pro key to. You probably want to uncheck the "I would also like to receive" offers.
Handy Recovery is a file recovery software that is able to recover (accidentally) deleted files on your system. If you have read my blog in the past you probably know that deleting files does not really delete them immediately but only removes the reference to the file.
Handy Recovery is a file recovery software that is able to recover (accidentally) deleted files on your system. If you have read my blog in the past you probably know that deleting files does not really delete them immediately but only removes the reference to the file.
I personally think that is is very important to use anonymizers whenever possible for most of the tasks on the Internet. All of your movement and actions are tracked and can be easily traced back to you which is probably something that most users on the Internet are either unaware of or do not like at all if they know that this is the case.
One major problem are P2P networks where anonymity is not that easily achieved. If you do lack the technical background you will face severe difficulties on the road to anonymity. There is however a great solution if you want to be anonymous while downloading and sharing files on Bittorrent.
A reader was asking me if I knew of a program that would observe selected folders and move new files automatically from those folders into different ones. It took a while until I found an universal software that is able to observe an unlimited amount of folders and move new files that are either moved or created in that folder into another one.
FileWarper is a German freeware which is fortunately not difficulty to use. I took the liberty and translated all buttons and explanations into English. You need to configure the tool once and keep it running in the background. Let me explain the various settings, don't worry, it is not much.
I'm normally not that easily fascinated by art, especially be the form of art found on the Internet. This art project however caught me by surprise. I found reference to the picture on Digg where it was advertised as "The Most Awesome Pic EVER". My first thought was of course that someone was again using the term awesome to draw attention to his article. This might have worked for the first post on Digg with the term awesome in it but Digg is flooded with it nowadays.
There is no obvious way in Firefox to reduce the size of the menu toolbar. I always thought that it was a big waste of space to have this bar enabled all the time. I'm personally using the Tiny Menu Firefox extension which displays just a Menu item next to the usual buttons such as forward, back and reload. I added a screenshot of how my setup looks like at the end of the article.
I did find another interesting Firefox extension called Personal Menu which reduces the menu bar to three buttons that can be placed in the other toolbars. Two buttons are for the bookmarks and the history function while the third is fully customizable. You can add any kind of menu from the menu bar for instance to this personal menu.
I enjoyed the original Lemmings game on my Commodore Amiga 500 but lost interest when the series evolved. Let me explain the rules in case you never heard about Lemmings before. Your task is to complete all the levels of the game by directing enough Lemmings from the entrance of the level into the level exit.
I found a great free software that is able to manage all of my media collections with ease. One of the greatest feature of Data Crow is that it is not only a software for managing DVDs, CDs or books but provides a way to manage all of them. To be precise it is able to manage Software, Movies, Music Albums, Audio CD's, Books and Images.
The sites Torrentfreak and Beautiful Crime announced an Anti-DRM T-Shirt competition a while ago and all entries to the competition have been posted on the Torrentfreak website. All 46 T-Shirt designs can be seen and everyone may vote for their favorite T-Shirt design. Who would have thought that this competition would get such a large amount of entrants ?
You can find some really clever designs among the 46 and I would like to display the five designs that I liked the most here at Ghacks. Just head over to the Torrentfreak website to take a look at all of the designs. The winning design will receive a price of $250, the second one of $100 and the third a price of $50.
People are crazy about watching videos on Youtube, Metacafe & Co. but the videos there are in most cases either entertaining or kinda crappy. In my opinion, it's a little hard to find really good or useful videos in this jungle if you're not searching for something specific or don't get a suggestion or link from another website.
You probably want to learn something new sometimes and in such case vivid video tutorials are many times more appreciated than written tutorials.
Desktop Nexus is a site with a wide variety of high resolution and widescreen wallpapers. The wallpapers are divided into popular categories such as Entertainment, Video Games and Cars. Each category displays the most popular, the newest and a selection of random wallpapers from that category next to a tag cloud and sub categories that define the selection even further.
One main feature of Desktop Nexus is that wallpapers are available in a lot of different formats that suit full screen and widescreen monitors. Resolutions start at 800x600 for full screen monitors and end at 1600x1200 there. The widescreen wallpapers start at 1280x800 and 2560x1600.
Don't you think it is annoying that Windows assigns drive letters automatically to certain drives such as the floppy disk drives A: and B: ? The A: drive letter is assigned even if no floppy disk drive is installed on the system. There is a way to reassign all drive keys in Windows by manipulating the registry.
A word of advise before I'm going to explain how this is done. Do not try to change the assignment of the drive letter C: which has to stay the way it is. If you change it Windows will not boot anymore. So, what you need to do is to open the Windows registry by hitting Windows + R, typing regedit and pressing Enter afterwards.
I really hate the behavior of Firefox in Windows when you open the options. The complete browser is not accessible anymore until you close the options again. This is extremely frustrating if you want to test a few settings. There is however a really nice way to change the behavior and make it that the options are independent from the Firefox browser.
To do this you only need change one setting in Firefox and restart the browser afterwards. Type about:config in the address bar and search for the string browser.preferences.instantApply and change the setting from false to true. This ensures that the options can be accessed and changed while it is still possible to surf the Internet.
Did you know that it is possible to override the way a website is displayed by default in Firefox. This can be useful for instance if a webmaster decided to use CSS code to remove the underline of links, change the color for links that open in new windows or display additional information for certain file type downloads.
The first thing that you need to do is locate or create the file usercontent.css in your Mozilla Firefox profile directory. It can usually be located in %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
