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
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.
If you ever wanted to download all the troubleshooting applications from sysinternals at once you can do so by downloading the Sysinternals suite right from Microsoft. The suite contains all troubleshooting applications that made sysinternal famous, 67 utilities in total which make it easy to troubleshoot Windows problems. This suite is not for you if you already have most of the utilities installed.
File hosts are extremely useful if you need webspace to make the file available to a larger audience. On the other hand I never fully understood why someone would be using file hosts to share files with friends or business associates. The only two advantages that I can see are that no other programs are needed to download the files and that it is easy to use.
Why would you need another program to block IP addresses if you already have a firewall ? A good question that can be answered easily. Peer Guardian uses a database of bad IP addresses and blocks them automatically as soon as the IP is added to the database of blocklist.org. A single user would have to know that a new IP (range) poses a thread and add it manually to his firewall.
Have you ever tried to manually check a image collection for duplicates ? It would take ages to find the duplicates in my image collection and I was looking for another program that would specially work with images only. Similar Images was mentioned in my article that was describing a program that was finding all duplicate files and I decided to give it a try by letting it scan my image collection.
A long timer reader asked in the forum if I knew of a program that would be able to join mp4 files. I was not able to give the answer immediately but after a short research I found a program called Yamb which is able to join, split and create mp4, mov and 3gp files. You do need the mpeg 4 converter mp4 box because Yamb uses it for the conversions. Yamb is mainly a gui for mp4 box, the hardcore users could simply use the command line to work with mp4 box, all others should better use Yamb.
Normally you do not see which devices have been connected to your computer in the past. It could be interesting to say the least to find out if someone else connected a device to your computer in your absence. You have to change a value in windows using the command prompt.
Fake torrents are spread into the system by organizations for two reasons. The first and in my opinion dominant one is to unsettle the torrent users by lowering the rate of successful downloads. Nothing is more discouraging than downloading the latest blockbuster for days only to see that you downloaded only garbarge in that time. In addition to this the trackers that spread the fake torrents are recording every bit of information they can get their hands on.
Doublekiller scans the selected folders and hardrives for duplicate files that are detected by comparing at least one of the following filters: identical names, identical files sizes, identical dates and identical CRC-32 checksums. Subdirectories are automatically included in the scan, additional filters can be defined to narrow down the scan.
It was only a matter of time until someone create a software that would function as a virtual diary. I do know many people that keep a diary and all of them are using the usual notebook to write their daily entries. Another method for the virtual generation would be to use a software like iDaily Diary to keep a diary on your computer. Software diaries have some advantages over notebooks.
A Firefox profile stores all personal information such as bookmarks and passwords in it. Everyone who is starting up Firefox with that profile is able to use your saved passwords and cookies as well which is a security risk if you ask me. One way to overcome this would be to protect the Firefox profile folder by moving it to a location that is not accessible to anyone except you.
I delete files most of the time by pressing down the shift key which will delete them immediately without moving them to the trashbin first. It happens from time to time that I deleted a file that I want to recover, sometimes it is because another file depents on the deleted one or it could be that I need to access the information again that was contained in the file. There is unfortunately no direct way to recover the files in windows which means that we have to rely on third party tools to recover lost files.
I don't like the iTunes software that much - it is slow and big and the only reason for me to use it is that it is the offical software that comes with the iPod. I recently ran into a problem which was fixed pretty fast by a quick tip that I found at one tip a day. I assume that iTunes is already installed at least on your main computer and you want to access the same library of songs that are stored on the main computer.
I write an article every Friday about a new great game that could entertain you during your weekend. The game for this weekend is called Bloodmasters - a top down multiplayer old school arcade game that I enjoy playing regularly for a couple of days. All the known game modes like capture the flag and team deathmatch are available and add to the fast paced game experience. The maps are filled with weapons, armors, health packs and munition to fight the other players / team.
Microsoft recently published updated figures about their Windows Genuine Advantage protection that tries to hinder users of illegal versions of Microsoft Windows to update their system with some of the software that can be downloaded from the microsoft homepage. Software like the new Internet Explorer 7 or the Windows Media Player can only be downloaded after a successful WGA check. The download and installation will be denied if a check fails.
If you are using different computers to work with you might have experienced the problem that you can't listen to your mp3 collection on all of them. I have my mp3 files on my computer at home and not on my notebook for instance unless I would copy all the music to the hard drive of the notebook or find a online solution to store my mp3 files. (like mp3tunes)
Glass 2k is a little freeware application for Windows 2000 and Xp which makes it easy to add a transparency effect to any window on your system. A great feature of Glass 2k is that it is able to remember the transparency settings that you set in a previous session. The default keyboard shortcut to add transparency is CTRL + SHIFT + a key between 1 and 0 with 1 being transparent and 0 not. Click on the image below to load a bigger image see some effects that I enabled on my desktop.
Not many free or open source video editing software suits exist and many people rely on commercial programs like Adobe Premiere to transfer videos from a camcorder for instance and edit / convert the video. Jahshaka is a open source video editing program that offers its users a huge functionality that can almost be compared to those commercial programs.
I had a situation recently where I had to extract about forty emails with attachments in Thunderbird. Doing this manually wastes so much time and I was looking for a way to extract all the attachments automatically. Thankfully genbeta posted a reference to the Thunderbird Attachment Extractor extension which does exactly what I was looking for.
I always wondered why Microsoft and Sony added hard drives with such low capacities to their gaming systems. HD Movies, game trailers for instance, use so much space that the hard drive will sooner or later be filled to the rim with the only solution to delete files to free up space. Someone on myspace posted a solution on how to add at least one 3,5" SATA drive to your Playstation 3. The 3,5" will not fit into the PS3 obviously because it is using a 2,5" internally.
Windows XP and previous versions such as Windows ME or Windows 98 lack some important context menu entries that make it easier to work with the operating system. If you want to copy files from one folder to another one you normally have to open two explorer windows to move the files. The Camtech Context Tools add many functions to the context menu to make such operations easier. The Copy to Folder menu entry would do the job in this case.
I'm a fast typer and it occasionally happens that I make errors when entering urls. I always hate it when I have to edit the url because i typed ghacks.nez instead of ghacks.net for instance. I'm lazy and always looking for ways to keep being lazy. Url Fixer is one of those nice little extensions for Firefox that helps me a lot when I'm using Firefox.
