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
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.
Time has passed since my last article about Ubuntu and I have decided to concentrate more on Linux and Ubuntu because it is a real alternative for Windows Vista. The Ultimate Ubuntu Tweaking Guide is a new user friendly guide that explains how to tweak Ubuntu for a better performance. It is a guide for new users because it explains every step instead of explaining just some and assuming that the user has the experience to get to the point where the explanation starts.
Most versions of Windows Vista ship with Windows Aero which offers a function called Windows Flip 3D which makes it possible to organize and use Windows in a 3D environment. The main advantage of this method is that it is possible to display more content on the same amount of desktop space which makes it much easier to keep an overview over all windows that are currently open and not minimized.
Most people don't ever think that it is possible that free and legal torrent websites exist, they automatically assume that torrents equal illegality. The list of then free and legal torrent sites proves this assumption wrong. NewTeeVee did a great job of compiling the list which is just a tiny fraction of the whole torrent scene. I still think that it is a good beginning to show others who do not know that much about bittorrent that there are indeed legal applications.
We had some reports coming in about some outages of the gmail - that is google mail - web interface which meant that some users could not access their mail accounts for several hours which seems to be a big problem for at least some of those users. In the time where customers for instance demand a fast, almost immediate, reaction to their emails it could become a matter of survival to receive and react to the mail.
Yesterday I was writing about a method to get a working Windows Vista key by bruteforcing. The method would generate random keys and check them locally for validity. If the local check would be successful the user had to try and use the key to activate his version of Windows Vista. This could of course still be rejected if someone else did already use the key to activate his version.
I'm sick and tired. Sick and tired of the RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, their methods, their pressure against their customers, their inability to cope with a new situation, their stubbornness and their greed. Instead of listening to their customers and possible customers they cling to their old ways of distribution and show an unbelievable ineffectiveness to cope with new technologies and ways of spreading music.
There are several ways to watch tv online. You can download episodes from video portals, use p2p networks to download shows, use p2p clients that stream tv in real time and use websites that do the same. The demand for and resources to do so are ever growing and it becomes quite a task to keep an overview over the best possibilities.
Many users are disappointed with the selection of bootlogos that are preinstalled in Windows Vista and many would like to change the bootlogo to a custom one. The process of creating a custom boot logo is pretty easy. You do need to download the boot logo generator which can be freely obtained at the authors homepage.
http://www.computa.co.uk/staff/dan/wp-trackback.php?p=15
A new kind of Trojan was discovered recently which targets only Japanese file-sharers. When executed the Trojan displays manga-like images with a reminder which differs depending on which image is displayed. The text however looks similar and always asks the user to stop using P2P networks. One of the messages for instance reads ""Ah, I see you are using P2P again...if you don't stop in 0.5 seconds, I'm going to kill you." Talk about a threat boy, jeeze."
We all know that it is possible to load more than one default homepage in Firefox by separating each page that should be loaded at startup with a "|". If I wanted to load ghacks and Google by default I would add https://www.ghacks.net/ | http://www.google.com/ in the home page tab of Firefox.
The Zune seems really hackable, wonder if that is on purpose or just laziness. Anyways, the following registry hack makes it possible to add Divx movies to your Zune player and sync them successfully. Once that is done the Zune automatically converts them to the native format which makes it possible to view them just as any other video that you have stored on your Zune player. Copy and paste the following lines into a text editor, save it and rename the file extension to .reg afterwards.
It is Friday again, time for the game of the weekend. This time I have a great beat em up game for you that reminds me a little bit of the game Power Stone for the Dreamcast. Little Fighters offers an astonishing amount of game modes starting by the usual 1v1 battles which can also be played as team battles with up to eight characters. Stage mode puts the human player against waves of opponents who become stronger over time and championship mode features a tournament.
Babelgum and Joost are two services that try to deliver tv content to your computer using peer to peer technology. Both services seem to have the same aim to make the transition from watching shows on your television to watching shows on the internet as fluent as possible. There is no configuration involved, all that is needed is the Bablegum or Joost client and a broadband connection to the internet.
I'm a participant of the Joost beta best and have currently one free beta invite that I can freely give away to one of my readers. I will be getting more invites as the Joost beta progresses and will give them away as well. I probably should start to describe the service that Joost offers before I announce how you can win the beta invitation to Joost.
Speedfan has been released in a new version yesterday which added support for many new technologies such as full Vista 64 bit support. The basic functionality could be described the following way. Speedfan monitors temperature levels of core system units such as cpu and hard drives and puts out warnings if they do reach a critical level.
Vista offers a new feature which is called User Account Control. User Account control separates user and admin functions in Windows Vista which increases security. It basically ensures that malicious programs can't be run using administrative privileges without the administrator first accepting it. This is great if security is concerned but really painful if you are running programs on a daily basis that require administrative privileges.
I do not own a Zune and will probably never own one but I know a few people who do own one, this article is for them. You can enable a hard drive mode in the Zune which is similar to the hard drive mode of the iPods. All you need to do is change some registry keys in windows which enables this.
Windows Vista offers a way to quickly perform a system check which results in a so called System Health Report. It takes about 60 seconds to gather the information and display them in a list. You find the option to generate a system health report in your control panel. Click on System and Maintenance, then Performance Information and Tools. Select advanced tools from the menu and click on generate a system health report to start the program.
I'm really fond of wallpapers and always looking for great sites that offer many of them. I do rotate them every 15 minutes on my Windows desktop which looks and feels great. Whenever I come upon a new wallpaper site that offers quality wallpapers without - to much - spam and ads I post it here at ghacks because I know that many of my readers also love wallpapers. The following site offers more than 8000 high quality wallpapers, the only bad thing about it is that it only displays eight of them per page.
So you have come to a website with many galleries that have a similar naming convention ? You would like to auto-navigate or automatically download all of the images without having to repeat the same step a hundred times ? Flipper, a firefox extension, could help you automate the task.
It is not that easy to use on first glance but it becomes clear after using the test gallery which was setup by the author of the extension. Flipper is working the following way: You click on the first image of the first gallery and hit CTRL + END afterwards which opens the configuration window of Flipper.
A reader was asking me if there was an easy way to migrate his data - that is cookies and bookmarks - from Internet Explorer to Firefox. I can see that this could pose a problem for some users that want to use Firefox but don't want to manually add all their bookmarks again. The process of exporting and importing cookies and bookmarks on the other hand is relatively easy and can be done in a matter of minutes.
Using multiple screens on one computer is nothing unusual these days. All you need is a graphics adapter that supports two screens and a operating system that supports it. Setup is really simple and many professionals that do web design or work with image editing software use it to increase their workflow.
Music collections are usually a big pile of messy filenames and folders that have artist, album and song names mixed up. Some files do have mp3 tags, some don't and it would take a long time to go through your music collection manually and edit the mp3 tags. I literally tried and tested a dozen mp3 tagger before I came up with the best solution that would be the most precise and at the same time most automatic way of tagging my mp3 files.
Many users seem to have the feeling that the memory consumption of Firefox seems to get out of hand after a certain perdiod of continued web browsing. It is however not that easy to determine the exact cause that seems to slow down Firefox after a while. I try to give some insights in possible solutions to those slow downs - they might help in some cases but could change nothing in others.
Many wallpaper websites can be classified as spammy. They have to many ads, some use popups and other means of making a quick buck. Good wallpaper sites are therefor rare and deserve to be mentioned in an article. The over 1000 abstract wallpaper on a single page website offers what its page title suggests, a good way of viewing and downloading some or even all of the wallpapers offered on that page.
Now that is what I call a bargain. Europeans do not only have to wait longer for the Playstation 3 to hit the shelves they also get a crippled PS3 that has reduced backwards compatibility. And the best of all ? They pay even more for the package. I was not sure what to make of the story that Everton posted today on his connected internet blog, he missed to cite a source for his story entitled: "Playstation 3 To Have Less Backwards Compatibility in Europe" and I immediately performed a search to find out what was going on.
Advanced users usually switch between open windows using the keyboard shortcut ALT + TAB which is fast but has the disadvantage that only an icon is displayed which makes it impossible to distinguish between windows of the same type. Microsoft created a fre program called Alt Tab Replacement which is part of the Microsoft Powertoys which displays additional information about all tabs that are open.
Maniac Mansion was a special adventure that introduced a new way to interact with the environment. It was famous for its humor, the choice of characters and storyline. I remember that I had so much fun playing it with a friend on my good old C-64 exploring every inch of the game. Well, Lucasarts decided to make money with the Star Wars franchise instead of making great games which is rather unfortunate for fans of classic Lucasarts adventures.
The Free Ipod Video converter is a very easy and reliable program to batch convert videos into a format that all video iPods can play. The process of adding files is always the same. You add files by selecting them from your hard drive, the free iPod video converter will display information about the file first and let you choose some settings in the next window. You may change the output filename and the video and audio quality.
