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
Microsoft decided that The Aero interface would not be available for Windows Vista Home Basic users. I personally dislike the new trend to offer several versions of a program with different functionality naming them basic, premium and ultimate. It confuses consumers who have enough troubles to work with the operating system less alone deciding which of the many versions of Windows Vista would suit their needs.
If you are looking for a rather unique clock you should take a look at the so called Rnd_Time Infinite Wall Clock. The Rnd_Time stands of course for Random Time but it is not the time that is shown randomly but the placement of the hours on the walls. The hours can be placed randomly on the wall while the clock is still displaying the correct time. It could be hard to tell the time but it sure looks unique. You do get 12 blocks that display the hours from 1 to 12 and another block for the clock hands.
The Windows registry is filled with all sorts of information over time. Many programs write information in it and sometimes those information do not get removed when the software that created them is uninstalled. Invalid registry entries can be the cause for crashes, drops in system performance and other erratic behavior. It does therefor make sense to remove those entries that are no longer needed from the registry to fix these issues.
I have been using the anti-spam software Spamihilator when I was still using Opera Mail for my mail accounts. Spamihilator basically sits between your mail program and the Internet mail server analyzing all incoming mail. Spam mails will not be send to the mail client but remain in Spamihilator where you could delete them or mark them as free of spam. One great feature of Spamihilator is that you can install plugins that add functionality.
I bought a Toshiba Notebook soon after Windows Vista was released and was wondering about the huge battery drain whenever I was using the Notebook without a power source. The battery drain is apparently caused by the Aero theme and the power settings for the wireless adapter. I was not even sure at the beginning if I was running Windows Aero or just a different interface but soon found out that the Aero interface, one of the few new things in Windows Vista, was active and draining battery life like crazy. I decided to disable the Aero interface because I could not see the use of it after all. Sure, it offers some nice looking effects but that is not the main purpose that I'm using the notebook after all.
I found this interesting article at the Lifehacker website. The articles lists 15 tweaks and tips for Firefox of which several have not been known by me. Did you for instance know that you could move a page down by pressing the spacebar, that you could move around tabs by pressing CTRL + TAB or that you could use so called smart keywords for searching IMDB in the Address Bar (try typing in imdb Johnny Depp) ?
The feature to add your own visual styles to Windows XP is locked by default and you need to replace the original uxtheme.dll with a patched unlocked one to be able to add visual styles to the operating system. Download the patched uxtheme.dll from Softpedia and do the following. Rename the original file which can be found in the system32 folder of your Windows XP installation to uxtheme.dll.old and move the downloaded version into system32. You will have to restart your computer afterwards before the changes are recognized.
Let me introduce Stumbleupon and Digg first in case you never heard of this services before. (must be living on the moon for a couple of years, uhm ?) Every user may post and vote for articles on Digg. New articles are kept in the Upcoming Stories section for a maximum of 24 hours. If the article receives enough votes in that time it will be transferred to the frontpage and drive incredible traffic to the website where the article is hosted. If the votes are not sufficient it will be removed and can only be reached using the site search.
Finding great flash games is not as easy as it sounds. I found the game The Last Stand at the donation coder blog and was blown away by the gameplay. It looks like your typical shoot all incoming enemies type of games also known as base defender gamers. At second look it introduces several strategic elements that make every approach different. You have to defend your barricades against Zombies at night and search for better weapons and other survivors at daylight. The goal is to hold out as long as possible and hope that someday a rescue team will come and get you out of this situation.
If you thought that you would be starring at those boring LCD or Plasma displays for the next ten years you will now be proven wrong. Some displays look incredible cool. I personally would love to lay my hands on the Samsung 12mm thick LCD display, the Toshiba Interactive 3D Display and the Touchless Touchscreen. I decided to only include my favorites from the ten future display technologies and suggest that you head out to the original website who posted the list to see the others.
I know that this may sound funny but I also received the error "The memory could not be read" during Windows startup. The funny thing is that this error and the error "the memory could not be written" are not related to each other. I found a fix that helped pretty fast. The memory could not be read is apparently a Java error which is causing the problem. You find a big explanation with various solutions at a official Java website.
I have lately been getting the error message The instruction at "0x62e2cc0f" referenced memory at "0x00000000". The memory could not be "written" in Microsoft Windows XP. This happened frequently when I tried to play certain avi video files. I first thought that I had a memory problem, maybe defective RAM or bad sectors on my hard drive but soon found out that this was not the case. It took me a while to realize what it was. Once I knew where the error came from I was able to wave goodbye to the memory could not be written and watch all the avi movies on my system without problems again.
If you want to rename files in one go without having to rename each file individually you should take a look at the free software Renamer NG. Owners of digital cameras for instance will love this software. The camera names the pictures that have been taken Picture001.jpg, Picture002.jpg and so on which is not very helpful if you want to know where the pictures were taken. A file renamer like Renamer NG is capable of renaming all files at once. If you would use the Windows Explorer instead you would soon realize that renaming hundreds of pictures takes a very long time.
It is not happening that often that you have to accented characters or umlauts but it sometimes happens. Maybe you want to write a name like Søren or a unique German street name such as Bachstraße. If you never had to type those characters before you might wonder how it would be possible to write them down using your keyboard. They are obviously not printed on the keys of it.
Many people sell their old digital camera when they buy a new one. Those cameras are often sold on sites like eBay and it is a wise move to make sure that all photos in the internal memory and on external smartcards are not readable anymore. This might not be a big problem if you simply took some pictures of landscapes all the time but it soon becomes one if you took personal and private pictures with that camera.
If you want to make sure that you never miss a change on your favorite website again and stay ahead of the crowd by always knowing when the website has been updated you do need the Update Scanner Firefox extension. It basically monitors any website that you have added to it and informs you whenever a change has been made on the website. You may alter the change threshold so that you are not informed about minor changes on the website.
Users with Microsoft Windows Vista and an iPod might have encountered the problem that under certain circumstances the data on the iPod could become corrupted after removing it from the computer that was running Windows Vista. According to Microsoft the problem could arise under two circumstances which I pasted below:
I have been writing about a program called Eraser some days ago which I used to delete all file information that existed on the unused space of my hard drives. I verified the results with a recovery program and found out, that Eraser was indeed deleting all file information of files that had been previously deleted on my computer. The recovery software was not able to detect any files after using Eraser on the hard drive.
The world's best Usenet provider Giganews has managed it once again to set another milestone by creating a software called Giganews Accelerator which uses header download compression to download the headers of the newsgroup up to 10 times faster. Header downloads are the most annoying part when it comes to using the Usenet. It sometimes takes longer to download the headers of a popular newsgroup than to download a 700 Megabytes file with my 16 Mbit connection.
I think it has become incredible hard to find bargains these days on eBay and I reduced the time I spend on eBay a lot over the last two years. Actually, I'm only visiting eBay when I know what I'm looking for and can't find it at a local retailer or online shop. The Lastminute Auction service might make me spend more time again on eBay though. It lists auctions that are running out in an hour or less and have a maximum price of $1. Various categories like computer, business and books make it easy to navigate the website and find what you are looking for. It is also nice to just look around and see if you can find something interesting.
I have added a "send attachment" entry to my right-click context menu when I perform that action on files. Adding attachments to emails was always sort of a burden for me because it was really uncomfortable to open the mail program, click on the attachment button and browse to the file on the hard drive of the computer. A far better way is to right-click the file and select an entry that would automatically open the email program. All that was left to do from this point on was to fill out the email address and write the mail.
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. The Ultra Hal Assistant is a personal assistant that increases your productivity. It is possible to chat or speak with the artificial intelligence to let it do a number of things for you. This includes starting programs, reading text, reminding you of appointments, look up local news and weather, define words, dictate text and many more.
OperaTor is a combination of Opera, the anonymization service Tor and Privoxy similar to Foxtor which offers the same functionality for Firefox. I don't want to bore you with a lengthy technical description of how Tor is providing anonymity, just that much: Tor uses a layered approach sending your request through a series of servers that only know the server before and after them. This means that the destination server does not know that you requested the package, it only knows the IP of the server before that made the request.
Like Meebo Imo.im offers any users the possibility to connect to various instant messengers using a simple web interface. Imo.im lets you connect to the following four popular instant messengers: AIM, Yahoo, MSN and Google Talk. The free service that Imo.im offers is free and easy to use. Just enter your username and password and select the service that you want to log in to. It is possible to sign on into more than one account at a time. By using the Link Accounts feature you can link those accounts which would have the results that once you log into one account all other accounts will be available as well without logging into them separately.
Many Internet users do not realize how dangerous Phishing can be. They receive a email which claims to be from their bank and they blindly trust everything that is written in that mail and will click on any links that are displayed in that mail to "update" their security software or passwords. They are usually redirected to sites that password fish their passwords and use them to make online transactions. I'm always astonished by the amount of users that want to do online banking for instance on the Internet but lack basic security knowledge.
Gmer is primary a free rootkit scanner which offers additional functionality such as offering an Intrusion Prevention System and a Firewall. The interface looks very user friendly but the settings, options and the results require at last basic knowledge of rootkits and other means of harming the system to apply and interpretate them in the correct way. Gmer does notify the user if it spots something suspicious and displays those results in red in the main window. The two screenshots below show two typical scan results after performing a scan of your computer with Gmer.
If you are looking for a cheap and reliable way to monitor a room you could take a look at the freeware Grabmotion which uses webcams to monitor rooms. Grabmotion constantly monitors the room and starts default processes once a motion was detected. Processes that can be defined include sending an email with an attached image showing the room during the time the motion was detected, sending an sms through a gateway, saving an image to the hard drive or playing a sound alarm.
Files do not last forever. Corruption can be caused by hard drive failures or unreadable compact disks for instance. The files might be partially readable but this does not help much if it is corrupted. There are some ways of preparing yourself against data loss. One obvious way is of course to make regular backups of your important files. But it could of course happen that backups get corrupted as well which most of the time happens in the worst moments possible.
I'm usually not using iTunes at all because I think the software slow and overloaded like the Windows Media Player. If I want to play music I use Winamp and to transfer songs to and from my iPod I use Floola. I still have iTunes installed but as I said it is only used very seldom. To be honest, I did not even knew that there were visualizations for iTunes available. You can think of them like the ones on Winamp for instance. I found this amazing visualization for iTunes and decided to write an article about it. I think it would be best to walk you through the installation and activation although it is nothing complicated. Download and install Magnetosphere and start iTunes afterwards.
If you like to think about the unexplainable, the mysterious, the paranormal you are one of the users who might find Disclose.tv very interesting. Like Mulder and Scully from X-Files you can delve into this site and take a look at the videos that they offer. On the technical site Disclose.tv is a pretty good Youtube clone serving only their niche. The site does offer videos and pictures as well as a forum and other ways to communicate with the community. The biggest video category so far is the Aliens & Ufology category with 234 videos followed by Paranormal with 80 videos and Spirituality with 31.
Flash cookies are a new way of tracing your movement and storing a lot more information about you than with normal cookies. One major disadvantage of flash cookies is that you can't locate them in your browser. They are not shown in the list of cookies that you can see when you take a look at the cookies that are currently saved in your web browser. Normal HTTP cookies can't save more than 4 Kilobyte of data while Flash cookies can save up to 100 Kilobyte. If you want to try out how they work you could do the following.
I was never that of a theme fanatic and used the windows classic setting on all of my previous computers because I thought it would speed up my system. I feel a little bit old fashioned to defend this stance against my friends who love to use themes for their windows operating system. It is not anymore a question of speeding up the system, with dual core cpus and gigabytes of ram available for most computers that are sold these days.
I'm presenting a new game as usual on Fridays and this time it is Bontago. Bontago is a real time strategy game that can be played against computers or human opponents. Players start evenly on the area and can place blocks to expand their reach from their current position. The task of the game is to encompass all flags that are placed in the level. The initial area of control for a player can be expanded by adding new blocks to the territory under control. The height of the blocks that you can place on top of each others determines how far the influence is expanded.
Par2 Files are common on the Usenet today.They are not that common on the Internet in general and I can't think of a location where I encountered them except for the Usenet. Par2 Files can be used to repair broken archives. That is the basic explanation of course, the technical is a little bit more complicated. Lets use a example to make it clearer. Let us assume that you have downloaded a number of rar files (.rar, r01, r02 and so on) that can be unpacked to create the file test.avi which has a size of 700 Megabytes.
The best software to control every program that is loaded automatically when Windows starts is Autoruns by Sysinternals. While this is an excellent software it requires some knowledge to use it the way it was meant to be used. A similar free software that is way better suited for novice computer users is the program Startup Control Panel by Mike Lin. It looks like a crippled version of Autoruns and concentrates on the most used locations where programs are added to be started with Windows.
We all know that it is important to securely delete all files on a hard drive before giving it to someone else. This holds especially true if you plan on selling the hard drive on Internet sites such as eBay. I know that some users buy used hard drives on eBay purely for the thrill of trying to find data that was deleted on that drive. This could get you in a world of trouble if you think of the private information that you save on your computer.
Pandora.com made the decision to stop streaming music to users who are not living in the United States. To be able to do this they implemented a script that checks the IP address of every user connecting to the server and if that IP happens to be located outside of the United Stats of America you will not be able to connect to the streaming client anymore. Pandora already updated their FAQ section to reflect this changes, here is what the entry said:
How are you normally transferring new videos to your Apple iPod Video player ? You create or download them, transcode them into a format that your iPod video understands, add them to iTunes and sync iTunes with your iPod Video again. What if there was a way to automate every single step of this procedure after creating or downloading new videos ? Yeah, I thought that you would like that. To automatically add new videos to your iPod Video you need the free iPod software Ipodifier. Just download iPodifier which has a size of about 8 megabytes and install it on your system.
Mixere is a great open-source audio application that lets you mix different audio tracks. It supports many formats including mp3, ogg and wav and can be used at parties for instance to mix the music live. It is possible to fade in, fade out of tracks, loop and auto-trigger audio and change the volume of the audio on the fly. All songs are loaded right into the main interface of Mixere with each audio file filling one track in the software. Any number of audio files can be then played simultaneously as well limited only by the operating system and sound device.
CopyRightLeft is a Open-Source application that has two processing modes. The first is an image by image mode that manipulates one image at a time. You can use the tool to open […]
