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 so glad that I made the change from bitcomet to uTorrent some time ago because uTorrent is by far the most efficient bittorrent client that I could get my fingers on until now. I receive great speeds, it does not use many resources on my computer, heck the client is only 173 KB in size.
The guy who is running One Tip a day posted a monster list of free tv sites and softwares that make it possible and easy to watch even commercial tv series and live events. Most sites and programs work for users from any country, only a few - like ABC - check the origin of a user and block access if he does not come from the allowed countries.
I never thought that a lot of users would still run Windows XP with the default service configuration but reality proofed me wrong once again. The default settings want to make sure that the majority of Windows users can use Windows XP without having to think about services that they would have to enable. This is great for compatibility issues but bad for the overall security of your operating system.
20 minutes to increase the security of a computer, wow that must be a good guide. The guys at itsecurity have written a security guide that indeed covers the basics of PC security. I do know from first hand experience that many users do not follow simple PC security guidelines, e.g. they probably have a anti-virus solution but never update it.
The following website contains links to 17992 tv show episodes, 5151 cartoon series, 2582 movies, 12235 anime shows, 5741 music videos and 957 sports clips. It is called Alluc and could be described as a link aggregator for video websites. All it does is that it offers the users of the website a opportunity to post new links to videos that they found on various social video websites such as youtube or dailymotion.
I'm normally not a friend of codec packs because they tend to install many codecs that are not needed on most systems and could pose compatibility problems with codecs already installed on the system. Windows Vista on the other hand misses some essential codecs that can be quite easily added with the Vista Codec Package which can be customized during installation. That is right, unlike other codec packages you can select to install all or only some of the codecs offered.
The Remote Desktop Connection feature in Windows Vista Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise editions enables easier remote access to any resource or application that your organization has made available to you. As you can see the Home editions are missing the feature which could pose a problem for some users of those editions.
I came upon a very interesting post on the vista knowledgebase blog where the author was describing a very unusual behavior that he experienced with Windows Vista. She apparently was running a legit, fully activated copy of Windows Vista and decided to install the upcoming mmorpg game 9 Dragons which is currently in Open Beta phase.
Did you ever have the feeling that your computer is making to much noises when it is running ? A high noise level can be distracting to say the least reducing work effectiveness. The worst effect: it could make you ill. I'm going to identify the most annoying pc noise makers and suggest ways to reduce the overall noise level of your computer.
I recently received an email from one of my readers who asked if there would be a secure way to update a Windows XP installation that already had service pack 2 installed with the latest patches issues by Microsoft in the months after the second service pack was released. His main concerns were about WGA, Windows Genuine Advantage. He did not like the fact that data was sent from his computer to Microsoft.
There have been two drastic changes to Googles Gmail service in the last week. The first will probably make most users happy, gmail is not available to everyone. That is right, no more begging for invites, just visit the gmail site and signup for an account if you need one.
Did you ever try to identify devices in your device manager that have a yellow icon ? Devices with yellow icons are unknown devices that give you almost zero information about the type of the device. The freeware Unknown Device Identifier displays a list of unknown, disconnected or old devices with information about each of those devices.
Taskable is a great alternative for online or offline feedreaders, it is a RSS browser that places an icon in the windows system tray making it a very effective method of displaying those feeds. I really like the ease of use and space-saving nature of taskable, I mainly use it to display my most read feeds in the system tray and check on them periodically.
You all know that you can run virtual operating systems using vmware. VirtualBox is a free open source alternative to vmware which currently runs on 32-bit versions of Windows and Linux and supports the following guest systems: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux 2.4 / 2.6, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista.
One of the flaws of the Xbox 360 is the inablity to playback divx movies on it. Microsoft might have left it out intenionally to push their own wmv format or avoid that the Xbox 360 would be used as the universal media center like the orginal Xbox with the (unofficial) Xbox media center was able to do.
While Audacity is a great audio editing utility with the ability to record sounds and edit them afterwards it still felt a little bit overweight for the mere taks of recording sounds fast on a computer. I found a freeware utility that can record sounds from any incoming source in various formats including ogg vorbis, monkey audio, mp3 and acm.
Wing Commander back in the 90s was a phenomenal successful game franchise and is still considered one of the best - if not the best - space simulation game that was ever created. It spawned lots of sequels and included cinematic story telling. The Wing Commander series was developed by Origin which was later bought by EA where the game series found an abrupt ending.
If you use the Windows Vista Media Center you might have noticed that playback for various formats is not supported by default. You can't playback divx, xvid or h.264 movies or play mp3 or aac files by default which is really annoying if you want or have to use the media center.
Birthday Reminder is a sweet little add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird which does exactly what the name implies: It reminds you of upcoming birthdays of users that are in your address bock in Thunderbird. It is relatively easy to add new birthdays to the address bock which then get automatically picked up by the Birthday Reminder extension
Do you remember Blackvipers services recommendations for Windows XP ? The site helped me a lot when I started using Windows XP by explaining the services that were running on my system. I just the information on his site to disable services that I would never need which had the effect that it speed up my system and hardened its security at the same time.
More and more users use wireless connections to connect to the Internet, many do receive a wireless lan router by default from their internet provider and forget to protect the router and the connection properly. Insecure Wireless routers are a main target not only of hackers but also of neighbours in the vicinity who like to waste your bandwidth instead of their own.
A good friend of mine recently brought her mobile with her and connected it to my computer. The phone was the Sony Ericsson W810i and I had to install the software for the mobile that I downloaded from the official homepage. Everything worked fine until I uninstalled the software again and realized that the desktop icon was not removed during the uninstallation.
Firefox users can configure their tabbed browsing experience by using the about:config command in the address bar. An easier way than to change the settings directly using the above mentioned method is to use a extension that displays them neatly in the options for faster and better access.
Windows XP will be the dominant operating system for the next years even though Microsoft released the successor Windows Vista just a few days ago. The major disadvantage of Vista is that it is hardware hungry and poses problems to users of Windows XP who would like to change but can't because of the hardware of their computer.
It seems that someone found out a way to create download links to the mp3 files that one can listen to on the profile pages of the bands that have a myspace website. The script to decode the myspace url and extract the mp3 links is working well and uses Ajax for ease of use.
I have not been posting new Firefox extensions for some time and I think it is mainly due to the fact that I got all the good ones covered and that only a few new ones come out after all. It's all Text is one of those extensions that could make a great impact for some Firefox users.
Floola is a multi-platform freeware replacement for iTunes which adds some much needed features that iTunes does not offer. Before you can use Floola you need to prepare your iPod and enable it to work as a portable hard drive. A good walkthrough of the different steps can be found at the official Apple website. When that is done you need to configure iTunes to manages songs and playlists manually.
If you are looking for an easy way to convert divx movies for special devices such as mobile players, pdas or mobiles you should take a look at the excellent freeware application Pocket Divx Encoder. Pocket Divx Encoder can be unzipped and run from that location without installation. You may select a device from the list if you want to encode the files for that device, it is possible to change the device later.
Windows has no obvious method to lock folders, even administrators have no obvious way of locking folders. Locking folders could be important if you want to hide certain files or folders to prevent someone else from seeing them or altering the contents. You never know what your children could do until they do, so better lock the important folders.
Taking pictures while you are on holiday is one thing, linking those pictures to Google Earth using the geolocation feature is the next level. Instead of just showing the pictures that you have taken you can now show the viewers the location the picture was taken in Google Earth.
I experienced some troubles installing files on my system and discovered that my partition with Windows was having only 50 megabytes of free space. This was astonishing because it is a 10 gigabyte partition with only Windows and some tools that occupy no more than 3 gigabytes. A quick check revealed that the mail folders from Thunderbird would occupy more than 3 gigabytes of space in the application data folder on the partition.
We all known that quite a few spammers make big bucks by offering software like antivirus, antispyware or hard drive utilities whose main function is to either spy on the user or spam him. Those products are quite common nowadays and it is difficulty for an inexperienced user to remove the software completely again.
It is really painful to open a file in Windows if the directory that contains the file has a lot of files. Ever had to find a file in the windows folder or another large folder like system32 ? The freeware Windows Multienhancer enlarges the dialog box that displays the files and adds additional information like file size and the date the file was modified. This is done by patching the Comdlg32.dll if the version that is installed on your computer is supported by Windows Multienhancer.
Did you know that it is possible to extend the 30 day evaluation period of Windows Vista to a maximum of 120 days with a single command from the command line ? You can use the following command to reset the counter up to three times to use Vista for a period of up to 120 days without activating it.
I never was a great fan of programs that would hide files or information but I can see that some people might find this kind of tools useful. I can think of several reasons why someone would want to hide files in pictures; maybe it is because a file needs to be sent by email and no one that would intercept the email would find the file or a way to bypass a filter easily.
Ray-Hound is a freeware arcade game with great graphics and interesting gameplay. You move your spaceship with the mouse and activate a gravity field by left-clicking the mouse. The gravity field lasts for 1-2 seconds and becomes inactive for a short period afterwards. Other Spaceships fire rockets that destroy the energy shields of your spaceship, once the shields are down to zero your spaceship bursts and you see the game over screen.
Everyone is able to download all the files that he wants and change the preferences of your Firefox browser if he gets access to it. It could be family members that tend to use your profile and add bookmarks to it and change the layout or a public computer in an internet cafe that needs to be protected from users who like to add bookmarks with explicit content or change the startup page to a explicit image or website.
I was so excited to write this article that I could not sleep well all night. Yesterday I have written an article that explained how you could setup a webserver on your computer and use it to display websites or share files with your friends. Today I'm going to show you how to use this webserver to host a local proxy server that you can access from anywhere on the net to surf sites that are blocked at your current location.
It is relatively easy to use your home computer running Windows to become a webserver that is accessible from anywhere. The following method is highly flexible and makes it possible to host websites, documents and files on that server and protect the contents with passwords if so desired. All you need is a software called XAMP which installs the Apache server environment on your computer.
For some time everyone thought that it was only possible to use a Vista update DVD from within Windows XP to update to the latest operating system. The Windows XP key would become invalid and the Vista installation could commence. DailyTech posted a workaround which makes it possible to install Windows Vista using a Vista update DVD without XP.
