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
If you are an early adopter and don't want to wait a few more days to download and install the email client Thunderbird you could head out to the Mozilla ftp and download it for your operating system and language right away. The Mozilla team is usually upping the latest version of either Thunderbird or Firefox on their ftp mirrors to ensure that they can serve the server load when they publish the links on the official program pages. This is indeed a good way to download Thunderbird 2 fast because the servers will not be that populated at this time.
Some users prefer to have as much space in Firefox for websites as possible. One way to get rid of some of the toolbars and menus temporarily would be to press F11 which removes the title, the bookmarks toolbar and the menubar. Another way would be to just remove the menubar which is not needed most of the time anyway. To do that you simply need the Firefox extension called Hide Menubar which removes the menubar once installed.
I was very young when the first three Star Wars movies made their appearance in the cinemas of this world but was fascinated by the movies since then. This changed a little bit with the release of the last three movies which were a total disappointment in my opinion. Nevertheless I like Star Wars and everything that surrounds it. I'm not a die hard fan but someone who can watch the movies over and over again without getting bored.
If English is not your native language you might have encountered some words that you did not know how to pronounce correctly. How would you pronounce zealously or eligibility for instance if you never heard the words before ? Even in the English language family words are pronounced differently depending on the region of the speaker. A Scott pronounces word different than someone from San Francisco.
I use many phrases over and over again. When I write someone an email, a business letter or reply to a private message in a forum. If you are tired of writing "Thank you for your email", "Yours sincerely" or a signature over and over again you might want to take a look at the free software Phrase Express. You can use Phrase Express to paste commonly used phrases into any text field using defined phrases. The program adds some of its own at the beginning but the real beauty is the flexibility of it. It is possible to create a folder and text structure that works best for you. You could for instance create folders for business, private and forums and add as much phrases as you want to those folders.
I knew that something like that was going to happen eventually and it did happen with the releases of "Stranger Than Fiction" and "The Holiday". Mick B posted the story on a new blog that he apparently created just for the purpose of bringing the news to the world. He rented the two DVD movies (from Sony Pictures) and tried to play them on his Sony DVP-CX995V DVD player. Both DVD movies did load until the splash screen was shown and stopped loading from that moment on. After 60 seconds the DVD player did turn itself off with no apparent reaso
Readyboost is a disk caching system introduced in Windows Vista that relies on flash memory to boost system performance. The effect is not that noticeable but some users swear on it and I do not want to discuss the usefulness of Readyboost. The USB device has to meet some requirements before it can be used for Readyboost mainly that it needs to meet certain read speeds. Many older USB devices do not meet these requirements and refuse to be used as Readyboost devices in Windows Vista.
DVD region codes, how I hate them. I never quite understood why every player and dvd created had to have a region code implemented to prevent playback of DVDs from other regions. If I was to move from the United States to Germany or Britain I would have to import all DVDs for my US DVD player because I would not be able to play DVDs sold in Germany or Britain on that player. The other possibility would be to buy a European DVD player which would not play my US DVDs that I purchased back in the States.
Youtube Sunday it seems. We all know that Youtube likes to cooperate with everyone who looks a bit like authority and takes down videos pretty fast. It does not always have to be copyright infringement, it can also be original works of art that some authorities like the Turkish or Thai government want removed from Youtube pressuring the site with a countrywide ban. (man I love the Turkish interpretation of Democracy and free speech)
It is no secret that companies like Logistep are monitoring p2p networks to sue file sharers who are offering software from clients like Zuxxez, a German company who recently sued 500 British p2p users claiming that they illegally distributed the game Dream Pinball 3D. The website Torrentfreak got their hands on a copy of one of those letters that have been send out which details the process of how Logistep determines which users are illegally distributing the game.
I love tiny free softwares that have been developed by passionate authors. Winroll is one of those applications that is useful and so small in size that it is astonishing how the functionality has been squeezed into the software. The binary has a size of 9 kilobytes. and does the following. Whenever you right-click a title bar of any window it "rolls up" so to speak and only the title bar is visible. Take a look at the screenshots below to get a better impression of how it looks like.
I received an email from Heather describing a problem that she encountered. She enabled the content advisor option in Internet Explorer but lost the password that allowed her to configure or disable the content advisor again. The so called supervisor password is defined when you first activate the content advisor. The funny thing is that the password is still set even if you uninstall and install the Microsoft Internet Explorer again.
I'm not a big fan of Microsoft Outlook but I have to use it at work because of corporate policy. Next to the Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 Microsoft Outlook 2003 is having a top spot in my software that I do not want to use but have to list. Some guys at work like the Outlook software and use it at home as well while I'm happy to use Thunderbird at home feeling more at ease with this excellent email client.
Relakks encrypts all traffic from your computer to the Internet by using a VPN connection which means that your real IP is not revealed on the Internet at all. The service had serious troubles in the beginning; users were unable to connect to Relakks at all, had slow connections and email support was terrible. Well, they apparently are making a comeback by emailing past users inviting them to freely test Relakks once again for seven days without charges.
I decided to try it out once again and was able to signup again with their service. You have to configure a new VPN connection in your operating system which is explained in the faq section of their website. Details are provided for Microsoft Windows XP, Vista and Mac OS X. Even beginners should be able to create a VPN connection this way. You can now choose to automatically use Relakks whenever you connect to the Internet or manually activate the service, I decided to use it manually but it does not make a difference as long as the service is running.
Now if that is not a clever idea. Force DRM on the users for several years with a pricing scheme straight out of hell and then use a huge publicity machine to make the customers believe that DRM free music is the future raising prices once more. If you thought that everything would be good now that many labels decided to offer drm free music albums as well you could not be more wrong. What is happening now is that the Music Industry once again fools the customers by offering overpriced products.
I forgot the weekend fun thread last Friday and promised myself that this would never happen again. Today I'm going to present a great arcade shooter called Veck Special Edition which looks and plays like a mix of many of the classic aracade games including Asteroids, Robotron 2084 and Smash Tv. This version is packed with 15 levels each lasting one minute. Every minute your spacecraft gets an weapon upgrade that makes it more powerful while at the same time more powerful enemies emerge that want to destroy you.
I read an rather obvious article over at the TorrentFreak blog that was entitled "Piracy Investigators Infiltrate Private Torrent Sites" which confirmed that piracy investigators have been getting access to private torrent sites by either joining them when they were still open for registration or being invited from a man in the inside. It was always pretty obvious to me that private could not really mean private if the site owners did not know each of the users personally. This system was bound to fail right from the beginning and the article on TorrentFreak only confirms this.
The VideoLan team has upped a first test version of VLC Media Player 0.86b which happens to be my favorite media player. The new version fixes some crashes, adds VP31 decoding to Windows platforms and Direct3D Video Output modifications for Vista compatibility. You can download this version right from the VideoLan ftp site; Simply select the version for your operating system (Win,Mac,Linux) and install it. I had no problems using the new version. If you experience crashes you might want to try this new version out.
I have been writing a article about three months ago which detailed how to edit the registry to display previously connected usb devices in the device manager. While this method is still working I found a free software that has exactly the same function. The software is called USB Deview and was developed by one of my favorite software programmers NirSoft. Before I start and describe the security software I would like to point out its use. I work for a company in the financing sector and they have such a strict security protocol that everything has to be routinely checked from time to time.
If you thought it would be fun to play games on the Nintendo Wii you should see the following Youtube videos to get an impression of what I consider ultimate fun. Developers have already been able to use basic applications like Google Earth in conjunction with the Wiimote and they finally managed to get some games working as well. All you need is a Wiimote, a Pc that has Bluetooth, some games that are supported and of course the software GlovePie.
Some users are switching between Firefox and Internet Explorer on their computer depending on the task at hand. It is for instance essential for webmasters to check their websites in the most commonly used web browsers. I thought it would be nice to share bookmarks between Firefox and Internet Explorer to use the same bookmarks in both browsers. This can be done easily with the Firefox extension Plain old Favorites which adds the favorites from Internet Explorer to Firefox. The favorites menu is placed next to the bookmarks menu in Firefox.
The world's largest computer expo Cebit which dated from 15. March to 21. March and held in Hannover, Germany saw some astonishingly creative gadget prototypes which were introduced to consumers and companies for the first time. One of the prototype gadgets caught my eye immediately. Nec called it the Dew Camera which is basically a wearable camera that constantly records moments in your daily experience.
Now ain't that interesting ? You can use Google Maps to get directions from one location to another. It is most of the time pretty accurate displaying information about highways, signs, exits and so on to give you a good impression of the route that lies ahead. You can try it now and head over to the Google Maps website and use the Get Directions tab to enter a starting point and destination to see how the system works.
I'm still using Firefox and I thought it would be nice to share some advanced configuration tips that helped me a lot with you. This article was inspired by Lifehackers Top Firefox 2 config tweaks but adds advanced tips to the mix. Rest assured that the configuration tweaks will not list the same tips that you see on every other site nowadays, I promise new unseen tips.
Let me ask you a question: What do you do with old CDs and DVDs that have data on them ? Do you simply throw them away, recycle them ? What do you use to destroy the data on the disks ? If you never thought about this matter before and have a stash of used disks lying around you might want to take a look at the compact disk eraser. The disk eraser is a handy compact tool that wipes out CDs and DVDs environmentally friendly keeping the disks intact. You slide the disk once or more through the disk eraser creating a wide strip that can't be polished out.
Tunecore online service offers an incredible opportunity for everyone who is creating music. You can use Tunecore to upload your music to their site and publish it at well known online music stores such as Apple iTunes, eMusic, Sony Connect or Rhapsody. It is possible to upload single songs, albums, cover art and everything else that is related to the music. Tunecore gets non exclusive rights to submit the songs and albums to the stores that you selected and to collect the money from the music sales earnings. They have no other rights on the songs such as merchandise rights or master recording copyrights.
Tribalfusion is one of the few companies that thrive on CPM, that is Cost per Thousand, advertising campaigns which is not that hard to get into. It actually took only two weeks until I got accepted and could run a cpm banner campaign here on ghacks. The advantage of CPM ads is of course that you do not need to think much about ad placement and layout unlike CPC, that is cash per click, ads like Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network. You do get paid a fix amount of money depending on the type of banner ads that are displayed on your website. The range usually is between $0.50 up to about $2 per 1000 impressions on your website which can sum up nicely if you have lots of traffic.
Many novice users use the software that comes preinstalled with their purchased computer and rely on these to be safe from the dangers that lurk on every corner in the Internet. Trojans, Malware, Spyware, Phishing and worse are threats that every user should know about and be able to deal with. It is pretty easy to detail my security concept, it is not the most secure on earth but even those are not secure at all. If you want security do not connect to the Internet at all, that is my advise.
Google displays 10 search results by default which is probably enough for most users who statistically use the first ten results most of the time ignoring the rest of the results. I on the other hand tend to view more than one page normally and was looking for a way to increase my productivity by displaying more than 10 results on a single search result page. I found a Greasemonkey script which changes the value from 10 to 100 for normal Google searches.
Media Create published up to date figures for hardware sales in Japan and the figures demonstrate a astounding success for the Nintendo Wii in Japan. Nintendo sold 1.041.975 Wii systems this year while Sony managed to sell 353.823 Playstation 3 gaming systems. Not to forget Microsoft with 79.013 in this year with their Xbox 360. It should be noted that Sony is loosing money with every system produced and sold while Nintendo gains money.
A reader of my site asked which program I was using to transfer files between my local computer and my dedicated server. The question looks easy to answer at first glance but actually it is not that easy. I'm actually using two ways to connect to my dedicated server depending on the tasks at hand. I use Putty to connect to my dedicated server when I want to administrate it: create new virtual hosts, ftp accounts and the like. I do use WinSCP for all other tasks, mainly for opening a secure connection to my dedicated server which uses SSH.
For the average user Microsoft Paint is just a basic image editor with limited functionality. It never occured to me that artists could great pro images even with such a basic image editor. I probably would never get in contact with works of those artists if video sites such as Youtube would not exist. Thankfully they do exist and I was able to select some handpicked images that have been created with the Microsoft Paint image editor.
It happened to me more than once that I was not able to unpack a zipped archive and recover the files within because the zip file was broken. Reasons for this can be numerous: Read errors, scratches on CDs or a system crash. Object Fix Zip is a zip tool that tries to repair corrupt and partially damaged zip files. It is possible to extract files from zip archives that have CRC errors or have only been partially downloaded. The free software creates a new zip archive while trying to recover the contents of the damaged zip archive.
A reader of my blog recommended a great music download site with the name ElectroBel, a free underground electronic music community site. The mp3 music that can be found on Electrobel can be listened to online or downloaded as mp3 files to your own computer. Every single song has been created by a member of the music community and released under Creative Commons.
It is really painful to copy files using the Windows explorer. It only displays one folder at a time and it is often inevitable to open two explorer windows to copy files from one folder to another. This takes lots of time and is not very ergonomic. The software Folder Box is a windows explorer upgrade which adds another window to the windows explorer. This makes it very easy to transfer files from one folder to the other or perform other file operations that require two folders.
My participation in both the Joost and Bablegum beta phase has taught me several things about those social TV over Internet clients: They do add interactivity to the TV experience. Users can chat about a TV show they are viewing at that moment or rate shows for instance. Both TV clients have one big disadvantage though that weighs much more than the new interactivity. Joost and Bablegum stream pre-recorded tv shows only, at least in this stage. There is absolutely no live content and the content that is currently offered is considered by many as B-Movie content.
Widescreen monitors become more and more common these days which run on native resolutions like 1400 x 1050, 1680 x 1050 or 1920 x 1200. Many applications, especially games do not support the native resolutions of widescreen monitors and it is also extremely difficulty to find wallpapers that do not need to be stretched. I did find a resource that has a compilation of wallpapers for widescreen monitors offering the resolutions mentioned above
I usually do not zip attachments that I send with Thunderbird, it is normally just to much work to zip the files locally and attach them to the mail afterwards. It happens sometimes that I do not zip a php file and send it to someone who gets only garbage because of the way the attachment is processed. I did find an extension for Thunderbird that is perfect for lazy people like me who do not want to go the extra mile just to zip attachments.
The initial release of Apples Ipod Video Player seems to have encouraged hundreds of software developers to create a software that would convert video files into the format that the ipod video player is compatible with. I was using Super for that purpose for a long time which is a great converter, probably the best that is currently available for free. Super has the disadvantage that new users might be overwhelmed with all the options and I was looking for a easier solution to convert videos into a format that the ipod video player would be able to play
Karaoke and Karaoke software is becoming more and more popular since Sony decided to release the first Singstar Playstation 2 Karaoke game. Even friends who never heard of the Playstation 2 before were fascinated by those Karaoke games and some even bought a Playstation 2 only for those games. In case you did not know, Karaoke means that someone sings the song while only the instruments play in the background. This is tremendous fun especially in conjunction with cold beer.
