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
The bios can be protected with a password to prevent others from accessing its settings. You have to enter the password to be able to access it, if you can't provide the correct one the access gets denied. The following method describes a way to recover the password if you forgot it or bought a used computer with a bios password.
Creating your own blog is no big deal anymore. All you need is some time at hand to think about a topic that you want to write about. I found out that it best works with topics that you are passionate about. You could of course write about other topics but it is in my opinion much harder to output regular articles in a niche that you do not like or know that much. I'm also only writing about text blogs, not about the two other possibilities video blogs and podcasts.
More than twenty applications have been released at the N.A.N.Y. Challenge website of donation coders. New Applications for a New Year is a collection of more than 20 freeware applications that do all kinds of useful things. I decided to list every application that was released and write a short paragraph about them to give you the perfect overview of everything that is available.
Jamendo is a music service that tries a different distribution model for music albums. Instead of paying money to download and listen to music you download the music for free and pay or donate money later directly to the artist who created the music. You may either donate money using paypal or visit the artists website to purchase music directly to support them even further and receive CDs that are send to your location.
Recently some news emerged on the internet that some gmail users lost some or even all of their mails that have been in that account. There is no obvious way to backup the mail that exists in your gmail account. You could probably forward the important mail to another account but this solution is not really that practicable.
Do you know that your anti-virus solution is working ? You could try to test your anti-virus program against the EICAR (European Expert Group for IT-Security) test file to see if it reacts the way it should. All you need to do is create the testfile and scan it with your virus scanner. If the scanner detects something it is working as intended, if it does not you should consider changing immediately to a more reliable one.
If you ever wanted to paint again the way you did when you were in Kindergarten then Art Rage is the right program for you. The free version is limited but sufficient for everyone who just wants to play around. I think it would especially be a very nice application for kids because they surely will enjoy the ease of use and ways of painting that art rage offers to them.
It seems that everyday a new tower defense kind of game appears on the internet and gets linked pretty quickly. I found areference to the game Curator Defense in the donation coders blog and can absolutely recommend it. You have to download the 50+ megabytes freeware game but the download is well worth it. Pieces of art invade the museum and you have to stop them to prevent them from replacing the master pieces in your museum.
I do not like Quicktime that much. I hate to use additional clients next to VLC to be able to view certain movies on websites. I also do not like the fact that you can't save movies easily if you do not use Quicktime Pro. I discovered a method that makes it possible to save movies from the Apple Trailer website to your local drive and watch them in your favorite movie player afterwards. I use VLC for this purpose but Quicktime Alternative for instance should be fine as well.
Most users that work with Windows XP in a home environment use the administrators account which is probably the easiest but also least secure way of working with Windows XP. A solution that most users dislike would be to create a limited second account and only switch to the administrators account if the privileges of that account are needed. Many users don't like this idea because it means switching accounts every now and then to be able to use the system.
Sexy Girl, Dancing to music that you like ? What can be better ? The Visualize Her plugin for winamp adds the visualization of a pretty exotic barely clothed dancer to the list of your winamp visualizations. Once installed and activated you see her dancing to the music that is currently playing. The moves are of course limited because, hej, this is not the real thing, hehe.
You have some friends or business partners that you want to share data with but have no website with enough space and don't want to use p2p as well ? One simple way to share files of any size is to use the HTTP File Server which emulates a basic file server on your home computer. The server can be run in public or private mode and it is normally a very good idea to run it in private mode.
Vista can't be bought by the public but some developers are already starting to create special tools for Windows Vista that give you the same functionality that you enjoyed while using Windows XP. The freeware that I'm going to review today is called Tweak VI and is the successor of the well know Tweak XP program. You need to supply a email during installation and will be asked if you want to install EasyBCD as well.
This game for the weekend will keep you busy for a long time. Ahriman's Prophecy is a 2D roleplaying game that reminds me a lot of the old Zelda 2D games. The looks of the game are nice and the developers did their best to create a believable world. You start as a young lady named Talia in the small village of Elden who is supposed to become a herbalist but finds out a little bit later that actually magic is her destination.
Keyloggers are a serious threat for everyone who is using the internet for sensitive applications such as online banking or shopping. The biggest thread in my opinion comes from trojans and viruses that log all keystrokes once activated. Other possibilities include local installations of keyloggers and successful hacking attempts.
I was getting some emails lately asking about the plugins that I have installed here at ghacks. I know that many webmasters read my blog and I thought it would be nice to write about the plugins. I also thought to write a little series of articles about setting up a blog with your own domain, please let me know if that sounds interesting enough. I have been using Wordpress since the beginning and find it really easy to administrate.
Did you ever buy a new computer from manufacturers like Dell, HP or Sony ? If you did you know that those computers come loaded with a bunch of preinstalled software products that are normally not very useful and use valuable disk space. One option would be to uninstall one product after the other until you have every last one of them removed from your new computer.
I bought a Nintendo Wii when it came out. As you might know you do not use gamepads to play the games but the so called Wiimote which looks very much like a tv remote control and uses bluetooth to communicate with the core system. Carl Kenner developed the software Glove Pie which can be used to control games and applications with gestures, speech and other input devices.
RivaTuner is a freeware tweak utility for NVIDIA and ATI based video cards. I have been using RivaTuner for a while to reduce the fan speed of my video card to decrease the noise level. I configured it to decrease the fan speed to 25% in 2D mode which includes all applications such as word processing and internet surfing. This is the lowest setting that is possible and it did reduce the fan speed so that the video card is almost silent.
It was only a matter of time until someone implemented a translator add-on for Mozilla Firefox. The add-on currently supports the following languages: English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Arabic. You may not translate between all languages though, for example you may only translate from Simplified Chinese to English but not to other languages.
I always thought that it should be theoretically possible to record any sound that you are hearing on your computer. Sometimes solutions for selected programs exist but I was looking for a free program that could record any sound no matter the source it was coming from. This can be for example quite useful if you want to record conversations in Skype or Teamspeak or record a sound that you heard on a website on the internet. Yes, even streaming radio poses no problem but you should note that the following free tool is not capable of recognizing the beginning and end of songs. It just records for as long as you want.
As you might know I have a modded xbox that has a replaced bigger hard drive and I use it to watch movies from my Xbox Media Center. I dislike watching downloaded movies on my computer and transfer them to the Xbox via ftp to watch them on tv instead. I was looking for a solution to add some of my DVDs to the Xbox as well which has the main advantage that I have them accessible all the time from there. No matter if I lend them to someone for instance.
It seems that currently a blog tagging game is making its rounds and finally reached me thanks to my friend Everton Blair who tagged my blog. Everyone who gets his blog tagged has to write about 5 things that his readers did not know about yet and tag 5 additional blogs afterwards to keep the ball rolling. Here we go, 5 things that you did not know about ghacks:
Men has been looking to the stars from the beginning of the world and this tradition is still visible in our modern world, although for slightly changed reasons. After the download of Stellarium finishes (Windows, Mac and Linux version available) you may startup the application to take a first look at the stars. I took a look from Paris, not sure if this is the default for everyone though. The name of the stars that I was able to spot were shown in the 360° landscape.
If you do now Pandora you feel right at home when entering the FineTune website. Guests may use only part of the streaming radio services offered at the website but it is good enough for a rough overview of what FineTune has to offer. Just enter an artists name in the search field and FineTune will search for the artist that you have entered and related artists and start with the playback of songs that the search found.
Ding Ding Ding, welcome the the next round in this amazing fight. In the right corner we have the underdog, a Russian mp3 website that offers what customers apparently want: MP3 files without DRM, variable bitrate at low costs. Did I mention that this is a perfectly legal company under Russian law ? In the opposite corner the RIAA, a institution living in the past, trying to hold of progress by sueing its customers and denying them what they really want.
The name of this software distribution is probably a little bit out of line but the purpose is not. The goal is to reduce software costs for students but the compilation is also attractive to everyone else. The website offers a version of this distribution for Windows computers and for Macs. You may download it using the preferred method bittorrent to ease the load on the servers and reduce bandwidth costs.
The objective in the highly additive freeware game Base Invaders is simple: Defend your central tower. Hordes of aliens, among them the feared drillers, ninjas and bombers try to overcome the obstacles that the player creates to lay siege to the central tower. Every structure in the game can be planted by the player, reminds me a bit of the famous Dungeon Keeper games by Bullfrog.
I think it is funny that I never experienced a hard drive failure in my whole life. Many friends that I have been talking to did experience corrupt or damaged hard drives and lost data because of this. Did I mention that I do backup my files regulary while they are not ? I could bet a large amount of money that one of my hard drives would fail as soon as I would decide to discontinue backing up my files.
It began with the ban of the Russian website allofmp3 by the internet provider Perspektiv. The Piratebay decided to ban users of the provider from accessing their website as a response of the ban against allofmp3. Guess what, Perspektiv announced today that they lifted the ban of the Russian website and the Piratebay in turn decided to lift their ban as well.
About a month ago my mother called and asked if I could help her with a problem on her computer that I build and installed for her. The computer reacted slowly to her input and was opening unknown websites for no reason. It was immediately clear that some sort of spyware or even worse virus or trojan was responsible for this behavior. She was really desperate and I began to scan the system immediately.
I decided to start a Internet Censorship 101 series of articles that takes a look at and explains the various methods of censorship on the internet and possible solutions to this situation for the user who tries to access information that are blocked / censored. I'm going to start with a relatively weak form of censorship called DNS Filtering.
If you are looking for a comprehensive, and I mean really really comprehensive, guide on bypassing internet censorship you might want to take a look at the excellent guide written by Freerk. The guide is divided into two parts; The first analyzes different methods to censor information on the internet and the second part describes different ways to bypass censorship.
I'm currently using the Video Downloader add-on for firefox to download videos from websites such as youtube or google video. It is working perfectly on those websites but has limitations when it comes to different type of websites that use MMS or RealMedia links for their movies for example.
While downloading the latest version of the bittorrent client BitComet it came to my mind that I never wrote an article about this excellent client here at ghacks. I have written about Azureus and uTorrent which I have tried both but not about the client that I'm personally using because I think it is the best one of the bunch. I like BitComet because of several reasons: speed, usability and because it is using low resources.
If you are currently unhappy with the features of your mp3 player you might want to take a look at the open source rockbox firmware which adds lots of functionality to your mp3 player including iPods, iRiver and Archos models. A firmware update is of course something that should only be done with extreme precaution because it will void the warranty. Take a look at some of the features that can be added:
Christmas is only seven days away and it becomes harder to find presents for your loved ones that do arrive in time and are personal at the same time. Sure, you could hop into the next store on Saturday and make a quick purchase just to have something but that's not how it should be. Money is also playing a role here - a limited budget does not make it easier to find something special.
If you ever wanted to know if a person you are talking to in Skype is telling the truth you might want to give the KishKish Lie Detector plugin für Skype a try. Just download the plugin from the developers website and run the file once the download has been completed. It will automatically assign itself to Skype and you will have to tell Skype to give this plugin access.
My first impression of Windows Vista was that it was a very shiny operating system with lots of useless stuff (for me) that wasted lots of valuable ram on my system. Things like the sidebar which may be useful for some are absolutely useless to me. Besides that they use ram. I have decided to remove everything that I would not need to increase performance on the system.
Windows Vista installs many programs and add-ons on your system during its installation which most users normally do not need. I'm speaking of things like Tablet PC support or Speech Support. All those programs take up space on the Vista DVD and on your hard drive and I was looking for a way to remove those files before installation - and Vlite is exactly the tool that I was looking for.
