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
I'm using Wordpress as the blogging software of choice for Ghacks and all of my other blogs. After reading Paul Stamatious article on optimizing CSS for Wordpress I decided to give it a try and see if page loading times would benefit at all from it. I also had to check if the optimization would change the way my blog would be displayed or would throw up errors. I began by analyzing the page loading times of my blog without any optimization. The result for the frontpage was that my blog used 166K and that users with ISDN (128 Kbit) would have to wait 18.55 seconds before my site was fully loaded.
One of the first programs that I installed on my new notebook that is running Windows Vista is the Partypoker application. The first start of the Partypoker application went fine and I was able to login into Partypoker and play Poker games. The next time I tried to start the Partypoker application I witnessed something that left me puzzled for a while. The application would not start.
I'm currently taking a look at Greasemonkey scripts in general. I always thought that it would be to complicated to install and use them which is absolutely not the case to my astonishment.Look it up is another Greasemonkey script that can be installed like any other Firefox extension. It becomes active once you reboot Firefox and works twofold. First you mark a word or phrase in Firefox and hit a key afterwards to send a request to a dictionary site such as wikipedia.
It sometimes takes ages to shutdown Windows XP and Windows Vista, most of the time when you are in a hurry. This can be caused by processes that are still open or not reacting. Windows tries to close those processes which can take a long time. If you don't have the time or patience to wait for the shutdown you might want to try the excellent freeware Superfast Shutdown which does exactly what the name suggests.
Did you ever have the problem that you needed information from two websites at once and had to switch between them all the time to access them ? I usually have the problem when I write a new article for Ghacks and have to take a look at another website to find the information that I need for my article. This gets extremely irritating if many tabs are open at once and I miss the tab that I want. To much clicks in my opinion, that is why I was searching for a way to display two websites next to each other in Firefox.
Vista Ultimate has a feature called Dreamscene that can be downloaded as a preview version including a Dreamscene content package which was released just a few days ago. Dreamscene makes it possible to use Videos as wallpapers in Windows Vista. The Dreamscene content package added four new videos that could be used as wallpapers in Windows Vista but you can also use other videos to use as a wallpaper.
If you want to monitor your network traffic either because you have an account that gives you only a limited amount of bandwidth each month or because you simply want to analyze the traffic that is sent over your connection during a special period. Netmeter starts in a small window immediately starting to record outgoing and incoming traffic as well as other data such as peak upload and download speed. You can adjust the transparency level of that window or move Netmeter into the system tray. You can also adjust the colors of the graph if you like but the default values can be nicely distinguished.
David Cancel, the CEO of Compete Inc revealed at the Open Data 2007 conference that (some) ISPs are selling so called clickstream data of their users to marketing companies like Compete Inc. Clickstream data refers to the sequence of websites visited including the time that the sites were viewed. This is however not all the information that the companies receive. They surely analyze the user base of the ISPs that are selling the clickstream data which can be used to create complex marketing strategies for certain states or even regions in the United States.
Microsoft tries to compete with its Windows Marketplace against the addon dominance of Firefox. The main difference between addons that you find at the Marketplace and those that you find at the Mozilla website is that some Marketplace addons are not free. This articles concentrates only on free addons for Internet Explorer 7. I try to point out similar addons that are available for Firefox to make this article useful for Firefox users as well. I do use both on different computers by the way.
Most of the addons that can be downloaded from the Windows Marketplace for Internet Explorer are actually toolbars. I would estimate that about 50% of all addons are toolbars.
Most of the addons that can be downloaded from the Windows Marketplace for Internet Explorer are actually toolbars. I would estimate that about 50% of all addons are toolbars.
Moby, James Blunt, Metallica, Jack Johnson and Madonna. That is only a sample of the artists that you can find on Sideload. Sideload basically searches the internet for free mp3 files that are for example used for promotions or available on the artists websites. Those mp3 files get indexed by Sideload and can then be found using the Sideload search. The homepage of Sideload already lists about 100 mp3 files that can be instantly listened to. Just click on the little green > icon to play the song that you want to listen to.
I loved to play games like Streets of Rage and Final Fight in the arcades with a friend. It was tremendous fun to several punks at once with the character that you have chosen to play. A nice feature was the character selection screen before you start a game. Would you select a quick guy who was faster but would not hit that hard, or would you rather select the slow brawler that hit harder ? Streets of Rage Remake offers six playable and two unlockable characters to chose from. All vary in power, technique, speed, jump and stamina.
It is getting better and better. I was describing a method to extend the activation period of Windows Vista by 90 days to a total activation period of 120 days. But this is actually not the maximum that you can extend the activation period of Windows Vista. Ryan from Cybernet wrote a nice article today that explains how every Windows Vista user can extend the activation period by the factor three raising the total time until Windows Vista has to be activated to
I visit Apples Trailers website occasionally to take a look at the newest upcoming movies and get a first impression that helps me decided whether I want to see a movie or not. It happens that I sometimes come upon a trailer that I want to download to watch again, or show a friend who does not have internet. There are unfortunately no download links at Apples Trailers site and I was beginning my search for an easy way to download the trailers I wanted in the quality I selected.
You can use iTunes to copy to your iPod but not to copy them back to your hard drive. I don't know if this has been intentional to please the Music Industry but I doubt it was just an error that could not be corrected in later revisions of iTunes. You have to look elsewhere if you want to copy songs from the iPod to a hard drive again, lucky for us tools that can do this exist and are free to download and use.
I'm not using Internet Explorer 7 at all but I know some guys who like it so much that they might ditch Firefox for it. The new Internet Explorer 7 has basically the same functionality and expandability as Firefox. You can download add-ons for Internet Explorer 7 to add functions to it. The Windows Marketplace lists more than 550 add-ons for Internet Explorer 7. The major difference that I can see is that Microsoft offers free and commercial add-ons for Internet Explorer 7 while I do not know of a single Firefox add-on that is commercial. (correct me if I'm wrong)
Many modern hard drives support a function called AAM - Automatic Accustic Management. The feature is currently supported by most hard drives from Samsung, Maxtor and Hitachi. Most hard drives have the feature disabled by default which decreases access time but increases the noise level of the hard drive. If you prefer silence over performance you might want to enable AAM to decrease the noise level of your hard drive and slightly increase the access time.
Pando is a free online service that utilizes p2p technology to share large encrypted files by email and instant messenger. The sender selects files and folders that he wants to share. Those files are immediately uploaded to the Pando server where they are stored in encrypted form. The recipient receives an email that contains a small attachment which starts the download process when executed. Data will be send from the Pando server and other users who are currently online.
A friend of mine is still using Outlook at home and I was wondering why he did not switch to a more secure email client such as Thunderbird. His response was that Thunderbird was missing a calendar and that this was a feature that he needed. I could not deny that there was no calendar in Thunderbird - until I found the Thunderbird extension Lightning. Lightning which is still in development adds calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks..) to Thunderbird.
You might have come upon this problem during scans for viruses and Trojans on your system. A malicious file was identified by your favorite virus scanner and it prompts for action. You can delete, move, rename or move the file into quarantine. It is however not possible to delete malicious files when you choose to delete them because they are currently in use and can't be therefor deleted.
I'm normally not writing that many articles with webmasters in mind but I sometimes come upon a remarkable service or site that I like to much that I have to write about it. We all know that webmasters use Social Bookmarking websites such as del.icio.us to bookmark and tag their own articles to drive traffic to their website. This is working well in conjunction with buttons that let visitors of the site add the same article to those bookmarking sites increasing the popularity of the article.
I never had the time and passion to submit my articles to many bookmarking sites and only submitted it occasionally to the most popular services. That is, until I found the site onlywire which handles most of the submitting process for me. I had to signup for the service - it is free of course - and provide login details for all the social bookmarking services that I wanted to combine. I then had to drop a bookmarklet into my browser bar and click on it whenever I was on a page that I wanted to submit to all of the services that I supplied login details for.
Spammers tend to use more advanced spam methods to avoid the dreaded spam filters that become better and better. I would like to present some examples from my personal mail folder and analyze the latest image spam trends. Many spam filters concentrate their efforts on blacklists and the text that the mail contains. Spam that is not caught immediately will be caught in the future if the user marks that mail as spam. Language and keyword filters and whitelists do their part and reduce spam and false positives.
HiJack This is a very sophisticated security analyzer that generates an advanced report of various registry settings and files in your computer. The difference to many other security analyzers such as trojan scanners is that Hijack This makes not difference between "good" and "bad" settings but displays everything that it founds in its security log. It is then up to the user to find potentially harmful files and settings and remove them from his computer.
I found this interesting article at DRM Alternatives and would like to share it. DRM Free Music Search is a service that searches 19 music sites that offer - only - DRM free music. Some sites sell the music while others provide it for free to their visitors. The search uses Ajax to display the search results. Just enter a search term and watch how the results appear below the search box. Every result displays the title, the artist, the name of the album, the music site that hosts the file and the possible price of the file or album.
I was not really sure how to name the title of this article. Jocr is a freeware that makes it possible to capture to capture a set region, a window or a full screen image in Windows and use character recognition to write the text of the image into a notepad file. The only prerequisite as far as I can tell is - unfortunately - a copy of Microsoft Office 2003 or newer with Microsoft Office Document Imaging installed which you can find under the Office Tools tab of the installation CD. The language that you are using has to be supported by Microsoft Office Document Imaging, about 20 are supported next to English of course.
Media Convert is a new online service which makes it possible to convert a lot of file formats before downloading the file to your computer. All you have to do is add an url and select the input format. Select the format that you want to convert the file to and click on convert. The only restriction is that the file has a maximum size of 150 megabytes, everything above that amount will not be processed.
There are so many supported file formats that it is impossible to name them all. I try to list the most important ones. It supports the most important text formats, such as doc, txt, pdf, rtf and Open Office, many zip formats such as zip, rar and cab. It supports 17 movie formats such as avi, mpg, mov and mp4 and more than 40 audio formats.
Amazon offers a huge product catalogue on their different (country) websites which has one major problem and that is clarity. Navigating through the content can be really painful, especially if you only want to check the current price of several items that you would like to buy. One way to handle this would be to store all products as bookmarks and check them manually every day to see if the price was reduced. This is however not very practicable.
The free Amazon Price Watcher aids you in this task. It allows you to search many Amazon stores - including those for the United States, Great Britain, Germany and Canada) - using the Amazon Price Watcher interface. Just search for products in selected categories and save interesting results in a library. The library offers fast access to information such as price and availabilty including a price chart which displays the overall price trend.
It is very convenient to save login passwords for internet sites such as forums, blogs or paysites to login quicker to those websites. That is, it is great until you can't remember the password anymore but would like to know it again. This could be the case if you want to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox or Opera for instance. Protected Storage Pass View does not only reveal passwords that have been saved in Internet Explorer while accessing protected sites or using the auto complete form but also passwords that have been saved in Outlook Express and MSN Explorer.
The Big Brother State is a short educational film created at the German university of Augsburg which tries to provide a different view of certain laws that are supposed to protect our freedom for the sake of our rights and privacy. Do we really need more observation at public places, trusted computing, biometric passports and network traffic monitoring. Who is able to tell that that no misuse will ever happen with the collected data ?
I think we all experienced frame drops and artefacts in avi movies which is pretty annoying if it happens during the whole movie. I found a media player called HDngn which is able to interpolate new frames in realtime using Direct Show and Open GL. This is achieved by using frames more than once and algorithm that recalculate everything in realtime.
I would not say it is the perfect media player yet but it surely has some nice interesting features that no other player offers yet. The drawback is that it currently supports only a limited amount of filetypes and not enough possibilities to change the configuration of the player at all. It took a while until I was able to remove the logo of the player from the upper right corner. I had to edit the lua file which was used to init the interface.
Crap Cleaner has been released in a new version just a day ago and I decided to take another look at it. I removed all options during installation except the one that would create a start menu entry in Windows - no need for additional toolbars on my system. I especially wanted to take a look at the Issues tab which someone mentioned in the comments sometime ago.
The Issues tab in Crap Cleaner scans the registry for missing shared dlls, activex issues, unused file extensions, obsolete software and many more entries and displays them after finishing the scan. You may then click on fix all issues which prompts to backup your registry before continuing. After that the first issue is displayed with information why Crap Cleaner decided it is one.
Right from the beginning Shadowflare reminds me of probably the greatest action rpg game of all time - Diablo 2. The perspektive, game mechanics and even graphics look really similar and are really good for a freeware game. You control a nameless warrior who starts in a small remote village. A dog companion that can be commanded is always at your side and you receive the first task from the commander of that village.
I'm currently using the Screen grab extension in Firefox to save complete websites as pdf files to read them later or print them eventually. Screen grab has some limitations, mainly size of the website that should be saved and that it only works in Firefox. I sometimes use Opera or want to convert other documents such as emails to pdf.
DoPDF looks like the perfect replacement for Screen Grab. It is a freeware application for Windows and takes only a few megabytes of hard drive space. It adds a virtual printer to your installed printers in Windows and you can choose to make it the default one. Please make sure that the Print Spooler service is running during installation, otherwise the setup of the virtual printer will fail.
The tv companies in your country decided that it is not worth to show all the games on free tv ? I always have the feeling that my time gets punished the most by this decision because i rarely have the opportunity to watch live games on tv. One great way of seeing the football games with no additional costs at all is to rely on a tv streaming application that uses p2p data transfer methods to stream the content.
You might want to take a look at Croosloops if you are looking for an efficient, easy and free way to connect securely to a computer at another physical location. CrossLoop enables you to see the screen and control the mouse and keyboard on a remote computer using an encrypted connection which utilizes the Blowfish 128 bit algorithm. Explicit permission has to be granted before the connection is established.
I took a quick look at the Gspace extension for Firefox in 2005 and it happened so much that I thought it was a good idea to take another look at it. Gmail gives its users lots of space, currently about 2.8 gigabytes of it which is of course to much for most mail accounts and this is where the Gspace extension for Firefox steps in. It basically makes it possible to use gmail storage in a way to store files online which seems a lot securer in my opinion than using a file hoster. The interface looks similar to most ftp clients out there, it should not be a problem getting used to gspace quickly.
Rectable looks so damn futuristic that I had a hard time believing it was a concept of our time. The reactable hardware is based on a translucent round table. A video camera situated beneath, continuously analyzes the table surface, tracking the nature, position and orientation of the objects that are distributed on its surface, representing the components of a classic modular synthesizer. These objects are passive without any sensors or actuators, users interact by moving them, changing their position, their orientation or their faces (in the case of volumetric objects).
It was only a matter of time until someone put youtube clones on the web that did not concentrate on movies but on other files such as documents. Scribd is one of the first sites that gives its users the opportunity to upload - or even bulk upload - many types of documents including pdf, txt and doc. Every single document can be downloaded in the same three formats even without being logged in, much similar to youtube.
The German computer magazine CT analyzed the new WGA Notification that is installed during Windows Update. They decided to cancel the installation and immediately after doing so the firewall reported that update.exe tried to connect to the internet. This caught their attention of course and they decided to analyze the data that was send after the connection was established.
They used Wireshark to analyze the traffic and found out that update.exe sends data to genuine.microsoft.com. Some of the data seems to be encrypted while some could be identified. It sends registry information, namely the SusClientID as well as information about the version of the WGA tool, the windows version and the language of the operating system. It also sets a cookie which contains a GUID which could possibly be used to identify the computer.
Did you know that you can add ifilters to the search function in Windows Vista ? The new ifilters, think of plugins if you like, add content indexing for various formats that the default Vista search (and desktop search) does not support, those include Adobe Reader documents, mp3, wmv and wma files as well as various other formats including zip, rar and help files. This is a great addition to the search in Windows Vista, especially if you do work with those file formats regularly.
Yesterday a story about building a gaming pc for $800 hit the digg frontpage and soon became popular throughout the world wide web. The system looks quite impressive if you consider the budget and makes a good impression at first glance. There are however some questions that arise which I would like to address. But lets do a quick view of the system in question first. They have chosen a Core 2 Duo E6300 cpu from Intel, 1 gigabyte of PC-6400 Ram, a Geforce 7600 GT, a 160 gigabyte hard drive from Seagate, Antec case with 400W power supply, mouse, keyboard, soundcard and Windows XP Home.
