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
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.
I thought my dual computer monitor lineup would be something spectacular, how wrong I was. Everton from Connected Internet posted an article today that has an image of an incredible looking computer monitor lineup. The linup consists of one 30'' center flat screen monitor and five 20.1'' perimeter flat screens that surround the center lcd monitor. This computer monitor setup needs special multi-monitor software of course that makes it possible to choose what you display on all the single flat screen monitors. Take a look at the image first to get a better impression.
We all know that Microsoft decided to add the search function to the Vista startmenu and get rid of the run box by default. You can add the run dialog again but there is a much better way to add functionality to the search box using a little great application called Start++. It adds new commands to the search box which define actions that are executed. Typing "g searchterm" for instance opens the default browser and opens Google search results with the searchterm that you have entered. Eight default commands are already defined and you can add new ones with ease.
Rootkits received a publicity boost with Sony's rootkit infested CDs that was supposed to be some kind of copy protection. Since then rootkits have become an ever growing threat on the Internet in line with Viruses, Trojans, Phishing and Spam. The major problem with rootkits is that most users think that their virus scanner protects them from rootkits as well which is most of the time not the case. Rootkits are much harder to detect by normal means and software that can scan systems for rootkits should be used by inexperienced users to be able to detect at least the most common ones.
Back then when I started writing articles for ghacks I was writing about a freeware game that blew my mind. The game was called Mono and had such an addictive fascinating gameplay that I played it for endless hours. The creators of Mono developed a new game which is called Echoes that uses many of the addicting elements that made Mono famous. Echoes is an Asteroids clone on steroids. That is probably the best way to explain the basic principle of the game. The developers put it that way when they describe Echoes: "Yeah, it's a bit like Asteroids hyperactive, drug crazed brother displayed in blur-o-vision© and viewed through psychedelic sunglasses in a cheap nightclub."
Keeping up with application updates can be a very tedious task even if you have only a handful of them installed on your system. If the software has no update reminder you have to manually visit the developers homepage and see if an update is available. Most users simply do not look for updates actively and use old versions that might have security holes or miss important features that have been implemented in later versions. But there is hope..
Since I'm running the wallpaper changer application non-stop on my computer I'm always on the lookout for more wallpapers that would fit nicely in my rotation. One site that I discovered reading the Donation Coders Blog is called Desktopography and describes itself as an exhibition of natural designer wallpapers. There have been exhibitions in the last three years with a total of 75 beautiful wallpapers. All wallpapers can be downloaded from the site free of charge and most are offered in different sizes.
Did you ever fell into the trap that you signed up for an supposedly unlimited service only to find out at a later time that the unlimited service did not really mean unlimited at all ? I fell into that trap with my first website which i hosted using an unlimited webhosting plan. No extra money for transfers over a certain amount of gigabytes, no worries about cpu and sql usage, everything was advertised as being unlimited. I started hosting some file mirros and ran some pretty resource demanding scripts and it did not took long until I was told to either upgrade my hosting account to a dedicated server or leave the company and look for hosting elsewhere.
I was running the Folder Size open source program from sourceforge for some time which had a great functionality but stressed my system a lot during size calculations of all folders. This was extremely annoying when I was opening folders in explorer that were having many subfolders and files in them. It took some time and slowed down my system. I therefor uninstalled Folder Size again and decided to look out for a program that would display the folder size only if I would request the information.
A new version of the Internet TV application Joost has been released yesterday. The first thing that struck me was that I had to uninstall Joost 0.85 before I could install the new Joost version. If that was not bad enough I had to create a new account because Joost changed to a new user system. Signup was hassle free though. There have not been many changes to the system as far as I can tell, one new feature seems to be the so called channel catalog which displays all the channels that can be added to view in Joost.
Many gamers think that the Dreamcast was the best gaming system of the last generation. It featured many unique games that never made an appearance on other systems. I sold my Dreamcast a while ago but still have a few games here that I did not sell with the system. Games like Samba de Amigo or the incredible Soul Calibur made a big impact on the gaming community. Yesterday NullDC was released which is a Dreamcast emulator for PC. It is supposed to be the emulator with the most playable titles running Dreamcast games at full speed.
Apple and Emi announced today that the entire digital repertoire from Emi music can be purchased at Apples iTunes store without DRM. The songs will be offered at a higher quality which means an encoding quality of 256 Kbps instead of the usual 128 Kbps. There is however one downside: The DRM free songs cost $1.29 per song instead of the usual price of $0.99 per song. I'm a little bit concerned about the 30% increase which can not be explained rationally I think. Albums on the other side will not change in prices at all which makes the single song price increase a mystery to me.
Wiikey is one of the modchips that are available for Nintendo's Wii gaming system. The modchip Wiikey is able to play backups from the same region which means Wiikey can play backed up PAL games on European systems and backed up NTSC games on Japanese and US Wii systems. It is possible to play Japanese games on US Wii systems and vice versa but it is currently not possible to play all NTSC games on European Wii systems with Wiikey. You can also play backed up and imported Gamecube games with Wiikey as well as Gamecube homebrew discs.
Did you ever try to remotely access a computer of a user who is not tech-savvy ? How long did it take to configure the client system correctly ? One great solution for this kind of problems is the software Teamviewer which is free for non-commercial use. Teamviewer uses two software modules: The first is the one that is run by the person who wants to access a computer remotely while the second is run by the user who wants to permit remote access to his machine. The client module is absolutely easy to use. It just needs to be executed and displays a username and a password which the user who wants to access the clients machine has to enter in his Teamviewer software which is called the Supporter Module.
About eight years ago I was backing up some pretty valuable files on CD. I should add valuable to me. One Cd contained demos of me and my clan playing Unreal Tournament capture the flag and I've always seen this as a part of my history. Well, I tried to copy the CD to my hard drive a few days ago and guess what; Some files could not be read and I lost some of them during the process. At least that's what I thought until I found the freeware Copy Cat. Copy Cat uses a superior method to copy files by using a byte per byte method.
If you do own a website you probably wondered about the value of it. With value I mean the amount of money that someone would be willing to pay for it. The following information could be very helpful if you need to sell your website, want to buy one or get approached by someone who offers money for your website. It actually happens quite often that webmasters receive mails from companies or individuals who want to buy their domain. Let us examine some factors that play a role in determine the value of a domain.
When I first tried to run a command in Windows Vista i expected to find the function at the same place where it is in Windows XP. When I opened the Vista start menu I was a little bit perplexed to find the Search in the place of the run command. Sure, I was able to simply press Windows + R to open the run command but I somehow still missed that function. I soon found out that it would be possible to customize the start menu and add the run command to it again.
One of the many disadvantages of every new Windows edition is the fact that the operating system becomes more and more bloated. Microsoft adds new features to Windows which could then be used to exploit the system.Instead of concentrating on fast efficient systems they produce heavy systems that look shiny but have problems under the surface. Recently a vulnerability in Windows Animated Cursor Handling was discovered. In order for this attack to be carried out, a user must either visit a Web site that contains a Web page that is used to exploit the vulnerability or view a specially crafted e-mail message or email attachment sent to them by an attacker.
If you ever wanted to access your mp3 collection remotely the Winamp Remote Plugin which is currently in beta status might be exactly what you are looking for. Once setup you can access your music collection from any web browser using a normal Internet connection. The computer with the music collection that streams the content has to be connected to the Internet as well. Just download and install the Winamp Remote Plugin and create a new account. This is important that only you, and everyone who is having the username and password, is able to connect and listen to your music collection.
Tails Gear is one of those Japanese arcade shooters that make it pretty difficulty for average gamers to see more of the game than just a few levels. If you ever played games like Ikaruga you know what I mean, they live of extreme amounts of enemies and bullets that they send your way and you have to move the ship more than carefully to avoid death. Graphics are excellent as is the gameplay, you always see some kind of sequences when you finish a level and move on to the next. One of the interesting features of the game are the satellites of your ship that shoot on their own and can stay in a place for tactical reasons.
DM2 is a pretty interesting windows enhancements open source program for Windows 2K and XP. The application can be downloaded from Sourceforge and does not need to be installed at all and can be run from any location of your hard drive. Once installed it adds a small icon to your system tray which can be clicked to configure the functionality. It adds by default several interesting new ways to interact with open windows in the operating systems. The minimize, maximize and close buttons get new functionality when you right-click them. A right-click on minimize sends the window into the system tray even windows that can normally not be minimized to the system tray.
Microsoft advertises its Anti Spam program Windows Defender with the slogan spyware protection for free but is it really a good alternative to other anti spam and spyware programs like ad-aware and spybot search and destroy. It is only fair to compare Microsoft's anti spyware software which is available free to other free solutions that can be used and downloaded for free as well. Microsoft's Windows Defender came under heavy fire recently as two competitors released studies that were supposed to prove that Windows Defender had - by far - the weakest spyware and spam detection rate.
Opera is already a very fast browser, but if you would have the choice between fast and faster than fast, what would you choose ? I took the liberty to compile a list of 10 great tips that speed up Opera in several unique ways. Many of the settings can be changed by simply going to Tools > Preferences in Opera but some can only be used by accessing not so obvious ways like ini files.
Please note that everything that I'm describing here worked fine on my computer. It speed up Opera and increased my browsing experience with it tremendously. While most tips will work for any users no matter their connection to the Internet some tips might only increase performance for broadband users.
This article explains how to disable Balloon Tips in Windows Vista. I thought it would be a nice follow up article on the one that described how to make the balloon tips transparent. I personally think that Balloon Tips have no right to be there at all, they look awful and most do not contain information that are important in any way. I disabled them the first day I started using Windows XP and I did the same on my Windows Vista notebook. Balloon Tips are a waste of time in my opinion. Let me explain how you can disable balloon tips in Windows Vista.
The Balloon Tips in Windows Vista look like the ones in Windows XP. While it was not a problem in XP Vista comes with a nicer more shiny interface that makes the balloon tips look out of place. Longhorn had transparent balloon tips for a while but Microsoft removed it for unknown reasons and the feature did not make it into Windows Vista. Glass Toast is a little freeware application that steps in and makes transparent balloon tips available again under Windows Vista. The application does not need to be installed at all and can be run from any location on your hard drive.
It seems that the big three, that is Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, always have to compete against each other. When someone introduces a new feature the others are surely going to announce a similar feature that is just a tad better than the feature of the other company. We are witnessing the race for Email storage at the moment. Microsoft has a storage limit of 2 Gigabytes for their users while Google has currently a limit of 2,8 Gigabytes. Yahoo decided to accept the challenge and give the others something to choke on, they announced today that they will offer unlimited Email storage to all of its users in the near future.
This article is going to show everyone, even the inexperienced, how to create a data safe that can store as much personal information and files as you want using the open source program True Crypt. True Crypt makes it very easy to encrypt almost every piece of hardware including partitions, hard drives, usb keys and other storage devices. Once everything is setup you would mount the True Crypt container using the password that you have selected while creating the encrypted container. This is actually the only password that you have to remember, everything else can be kept in the encrypted container for safety reasons.
The free social music networking site Jamendo announced today that they have distributed more than one million downloads of albums that are freely available using bittorrent technology. Only albums that have been fully distributed have been counted or as they put it: "this figure is the minimum indicative number of the total of complete albums we have distributed so far". This is a huge success for sites that believe that drm free music sites can and will succeed in the long run. Jamendo has an incredible download rate of more than 200000 albums every month and the figure is increasing with each passing month.
Jabbits is a interesting new interactive website that is supposed to be the worlds first interactive video website. It could be described as some type of video answers website where one user posts a question and all others reply to it. The major difference to normal written conversations is that everything is recorded on video and can be accessed through Jabbits. There are actually three types of questions on Jabbits: Public, Research and Private questions. Public questions come from normal visitors who would like an answer to a question whereas research questions are added by companies who pay the users that answer the question that they ask. Private questions can only be answered by users who have been invited by the creator of the question to answer it.
I came upon the article "How I would hack your weak passwords" yesterday and pondered if I should write an article about it. I decided that it would be worth it. The author of the article details how he would try and find out your passwords and get access to all of your accounts in the end. His first approach would be to use the most common used passwords by users on the net. He needs information about your personal life for some passwords but those information can be obtained pretty fast through social engineering. Trying those "top 10" passwords would already cover a large percentage of online users, statistically speaking that is.
You might know that Youtube held a video awards voting on their site for the last five days were everyone was able to vote for their favorite videos that Youtube preselected. Ten entries were shown and you could assign spots from 1 to 10 to them. Now, after all votes have been cast Youtube presents the Winners of the 2006 Video Awards in the categories Most Creative, Best Comedy, Best Commentary, Best Series, Best Music Video, Most Inspirational and Most Adorable. The videos below are in the same order in case you are wondering.
Nothing is more frustrating than to realize that some files of a backup are corrupted. This happens of course right at the time when you need the backup. One way to prevent this scenario from happening would be to use different locations for your backups, for example CDs, external hard drives and USB drives. Even though you store the backup in different places it is not guaranteed that the files on those devices are not corrupted. The probability that it will happen is simply reduced.
Since I started blogging two years ago I came upon thousands of essential, ultimate and top freeware lists but only few really had a lasting impact on the internet community. Most are forgotten the next day and everyone heads on to the next list in line. It does not make sense to simply write another essential list, it does however make sense when I'm concentrating this list on freeware and Open source that I have reviewed here at ghacks. I reviewed more than 360 freeware and Open Source products which could be seen as a preselection.
It is rather unfortunate that Windows Vista has problems to provide correct drivers for many "not so popular" devices. This could lead to the problem that a device will not be recognized correctly under Windows Vista reducing its functionality or that the device is not working at all. The usual search the web for drivers option was bad in Windows XP and is bad in Windows Vista as well. You could of course head out and search the internet for drivers to make them work in Windows Vista but this takes lots of time and knowledge.
If you have hundreds of bookmarks in different folders like I do you might know the problem that bookmarks are added from time to time that already exist in your list. It is not that easy to manage the bookmarks and keep an overview over them all. A complicated folder structure with many subfolders is adding to the problem. It really does not help to check your bookmarks manually every know and then, this takes to long and does not prevent that duplicate bookmarks are added at a later date again. The Firefox extension Bookmark Duplicate Detector is helpful for users with a lot of bookmarks.
Several software music players and mp3 players do not support WMA files at all. Wma, Windows Media Audio, is a format that was developed by Microsoft and initially designed to compete with the popular mp3 format. WMA however never received the popularity of the mp3 format and many users don't like WMA at all because of its DRM capabilities. Converting WMA to MP3 is one solution to get rid of WMA files and make them playable in your software and mp3 players. One way to convert wma audio files to mp3 is to use the software Free WMA to MP3 Converter.
