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
Many software mp3 players are bloated with features that most users rarely use or even know of. 1By1 is a small, resource-saving software mp3 player - the size of the player is only about 100K. It offers some interesting features that are worth a closer look.
We already know that most iPod can store various information next to music and videos. Wikipedia can be uploaded as well as information about subways in various citys. The iPod city guide is another excellent application for most iPods, including iPod Nano and iPod Video, which adds information about more than 300 cities to your iPod.
The Windows Clipboard is absolutely awful, it lacks so many features that I really do not know where to begin listing them. Ditto on the other hand is an open source replacement for the Windows clipboard that adds functionality to the clipboard function. Ditto makes it easy to save any type of information to the clipboard including the most usual data types such as text, images and code.
Didier Stevens did it again with a pretty useful tool that could be used for backups that should be placed on another server on the internet. This is great if you want to separate site or operating system backups from the running server to avoid that both are not recoverable after a crash.
Many users are still unaware of the dangers that phishing could mean for their life's. They might now that hackers try to lure unsuspecting users to fake websites hoping that their victims would try to supply login information, credit card details or social security numbers while trying to use the service. Those users already have difficulties identifying those first generation phishing websites that undoubtedly look and feel more professional with every passing day.
Soundjuicer is a nice CD ripper for Gnome 2 and probably the tool of choice when it comes to Cd ripping in Ubuntu. Depending on your installation it could be that ripping CDs directly to mp3 is not supported by default and has to be added to make this possible. This could be useful if you own a mp3 player that does not support the ogg or flac format.
Ballistic is a addictive 3D maze type of game that reminds me a little bit of games like Marble Madness. The game Ballistic however brings some new elements to the "move ball to exit" type of games. First, the environment is fully 3D compared to the two dimensions of the other games. Second you do not move the ball(s) but the complete level and the ball just follows the laws of physics.
I was looking for a Firefox extension that would fill out certain forms automatically which would help me a lot because I'm filling out a lot of forms to test out new sites and register for products. The guys at downloadsquad found a nice Firefox extension called FireForm which does exactly what I was looking for.
Green Beret, Wings of Fury and Ghouls and Ghosts - if those names ring a bell you have come to the right place. Everyone else join us as we delve into a time where some of the greatest games of all time were produced. The motto of the 2006 Retro Remakes competition is "Good remakes of good games that anyone can play, regardless of their ability". I think this is indeed a great opportunity for old folks like us to enjoy those games we played when we were young once again and for us young folks to play games that we probably never heard about before.
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.
