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 don't like those big subway maps that you get for free when you visit cities like London, Paris or New York. They are big, they tell everyone that you are a tourist (attracts criminals) and not that handy if you need a quick answer about a certain subway you need to catch.
The email client Thunderbird does not necessarily retrieve messages from all of your mail accounts at startup. By default the first mail account will be checked on startup and all mail accounts will be checked every ten minutes. The following user.js tweak changes this behavior in the way that Thunderbird retrieves mail from all accounts at startup as well.
I hate game intro movies with a passion. Some games force the user to view about half a dozen of intros without giving him the change to escape them because the normal keys that cancel the playback are disabled. If you are unlucky you have to watch the producers logo, the developments team logo, nvidia, another team that worked on the game (multiplayer part for instance), the normal intro, an EA logo..
What is going on in Southpark ? After the highly successful World of Warcraft Episode the producers published a second episode that is centered around entertainment technology. Cartman longs for the Nintendo Wii and can't wait the three weeks until it will be released in the United States. He comes to the conclusion that deep freezing himself is the only solution which reduces the wait time. The plan goes terribly wrong.. but see for yourself.
Most teens love ringtones, new ones, unique ones that none of their friends have. It almost seems like a race for the newest coolest ringtone which starts again with every passing day. One method to get the newest ringtones would be to buy them for horrendous prices - honestly I never understood why users would pay so much money for a 20 seconds song. A better (cheaper) way would be to create the ringtones on your own which ensures two things:
The developers of Firefox removed the option to disable third party cookies in firefox 2.0 stating the reason that it was not possible to block all third party cookies with this function. Third Party Cookies are mainly cookies that track user behavior, the big ad networks for instance like to use them a lot. There are basically two options to disable third party cookies in Firefox.
Defragmenting the hard drives of your computer is important especially for users who install lots of programs or perform lots of read and write operations on their hard drives (p2p users for instance). In a perfect world files would be written contiguously on the hard drive - in the world of windows they are not. Read operations waste more time because all the bits that make the file are not in one place but scattered around the complete hard drive. Defragmenting the drive moves them closer to each other to speed up loading times.
Windows Explorer is a basic file manager with severe limitations that make it rather painful to perform some operations using it - you know what I mean if you ever tried to compare two directories using it for example. DMEXBar steps in and adds lots of functionality to the windows explorer by appending a toolbar to it. Once installed a toolbar should be automatically added to every windows explorer window, moving the mouse over one of the buttons in the menu displays a short information about that button.
Windows XP has the annoying habit of assuming that every user wants to run his operating system with the same screen resolution, color depth and refresh rate. If you ever had to share a computer running windows xp with older folks you know what I mean - they tend to love low resolutions because everything on the screen appears to be bigger that way.
I thought that it would be a nice idea to compile a list of privacy and security related add-ons for firefox 2.0. The list is not complete but I think I have everything covered with those add-ons, feel free to add your top picks in the comments. Let's go.
Yesterday Microsoft released the new Windows media player 11 silently it seems. You can download the (final ?) version of the Media Player at the official Media Player homepage. This version is only usuable with Windows XP so everyone with a different system won't be able to use this new version. Guidelines for common actions like installing the player, codec information and playing / burning files can be found in the faq entries of Media Player 11.
One of the blogs that I'm regularly visiting is Connected Internet created by my friend Everton Blair. He writes mainly about the same topics that I write about (with a slight British touch) and once in a while I find a interesting story that I would like to write about at ghacks as well. He discovered a automatic playlist generator for iTunes called The Filter.
IRC, Internet Relay Chat, is one of the greatest communication platforms on the internet. You normally connect to one of the IRC servers using tools like mirc for instance. Once connected you may want to start by receiving a list of open channels on that server and afterwards connecting to some of them. Once in a channel you can chat, privately chat and send / receive files to other users or channel bots.
Most computer users do know Counterstrike even though they probably never played it. You side either with the anti-terror unit or the terrorist and try to beat the other team by completing an objective or elimination all other players. Counterstrike 2D is a freeware conversion of this popular game. The interface looks and feels like the real thing, you may configure your keys and choose to play against bots or on the internet against human players.
There are times when it is safer to remain anonymous on the internet - be it that you want to write something about your current company on the web, live in a country that does everything to prevent it's citizens from accessing unbiased information or simply for the reason that you do not wish that someone could track what you are doing on the internet. In an ideal world every user should have the right to read and publish on the internet without the fear of loosing his job or life. The world however is not ideal and tools like FoxTor exist to help those people out.
Danish Provider Tele2 has to block access to the Russian mp3 website allofmp3 after loosing a civil lawsuit against the IFPI
(International Federation of the Phonographic Industry). The complete story can be read at slyck news. The question that naturally arises is if this can be called censorship. Music Industry and it's lobbyist groups claim that allofmp3 is illegal although it is perfectly legal according to Russian law.
I have a large collection of movies both off-line and on my computer and it is sometimes hard to keep the overview of everything that is in my possession. It happened more than once that I bought a movie that I already own which is rather dumb because there are ways to prevent this from happening.
This extension is sweet. If you like to open many tabs at once and flip around while surfing you might encounter the problem that you can't find a certain article in the massive amount of tabs that are open at the time. I usually flip through them until I find the article that I was searching for. Takes a lot of time and I always was hoping for an extension that would help me optimize this procedure.
Aol will offer movie and tv show downloads from Paramount Pictures in their new video portal. Downloads will be sold for prices ranging from $9.99 to $19.99 which suggests that most users will be quite unhappy with the pricing. Amazon Unbox and Apple's iTunes is offering download in the same price category and every other portal will most likely follow them.
Most internet users have serious troubles with passwords: they either choose to use the same password on all sites, use passwords that can be easily guessed by looking at the persons background or write all their passwords down to be able to look them up if they forget them. Only a few users use high quality passwords that they are able to remember.
The Mozilla team finally uploaded version 2.0 final of Firefox to the ftp servers with the web servers surely to following not later than tomorrow. If you want to be one of the first to download the new final version I suggest you do so with the links for: Windows or Mac / Linux.
Open Pandora is a freeware application that adds features to Pandora, the famous music service that finds new music of similar taste for you. Pandora itself is designed to function in your browser making it rather uncomfortable to listen to the music. Enter Open Pandora:
AutoIt is a freeware scripting language that runs on every Windows operating system starting with Windows 95. It makes it possible to use a combination of mouse movements, keystrokes and window / control manipulation to automate tasks in Windows. It is also capable of executing Windows and Dos programs.
Internet Explorer comes equipped with the same technique as firefox that allows users to create addons and offer them for download on a site that was specially created for this purpose by Microsoft. Ieaddons is the name of the site and looks like a typical slow-loading Microsoft website. Add-Ons are categorised in the four categories Security, Time Savers, Browsers and Entertainment.
ZoomIt is a freeware from Sysinternals which lets you zoom into part of your screen. With resolutions beyond 1600*1200 it becomes more urgent to have a utility that lets you zoom into part of your screen to magnify that part. It is also nice if you want to take a closer look at low resolution images for instance.
You might want to import already received mails into your gmail account, one reason could be that you want to make the complete switch to gmail and never use the old email client again. There is unfortunately no import function to do that in gmail, at least none that I was able to find in my gmail account.
Please read on this is a funny story, I promise that. Germans pay about 19$ a month if they own a television. This fee was introduced right after the war to make it possible that state independent tv stations would be able to run without receiving money from the state. There were only those stations after the war and it made sense at this time. Nowadays you have dozens of tv stations but you still pay the money for those state independent ones (all other stations don't see a dime of that money).
Oh well, the name wonderful icon is not really helping when you try to figure out what this freeware does. The main purpose is to assign new hotkeys to windows. The program offers you a great deal of predefined actions that can be assigned to an hotkey, for instance: Open Browser, Dos Box, Always on Top, Type Char xyz into window, reboot and many more. I would say there are around 100+ predefined actions and you also have the ability to create new ones very easily.
Microsoft finally made it happen and released the final version of Internet Explorer 7 to the public. You can download it from the official internet explorer website at microsoft.com. The download works without problems for everyone, the installation checks for WGA (windows genuine advantage) which means you can't install it if you have no legit key. Please note that Internet Explorer 7 is currently only available for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
Well what do we have here ? FBI director Robert Mueller wants that service providers record their customers online activities with the same lame excuses that men like him come always up with: Protecting minors and terrorism. Let me get something straight here. Terrorists are not uneducated, they know how to build explosives, they know how to work with computers. They especially now about encryption.
Sounds on my computer seem to be different depending on the application that is used to play the sounds. Sometimes I have almost silent video playback and loud intros when playing games. What's the matter with the differences ? Volumouse gives you immediate control of the volume on your computer making it possible to alter it without leaving the application that you are currently working with.
Inspired by Gnome's Oh no more hand-picked free games I decided to create the motherload of free games. A List that contains every single free game that is worth playing. I'am absolutely sure that my initial list will miss many games but it will grow over time - with your help. I know that you have an ace up your sleeve and will help me create the list.
It is not possible to autorun applications from an USB stick in windows unless you already have a program started that watches the usb ports. APO usb autorun suite makes it pretty easy to use autorun informations on usb drives. The tool checks wether a connected usb drive contains autorun information, if it does those are executed.
When you delete the visited urls and the cache in Internet Explorer after disconnecting your computer from the internet you are safe, right ? Many users think that it is impossible to find out which websites have been visited when they delete the cache and the history. This is not true..
Don't you hate it when you visit a website, see an interesting movie stream and can't find a way to dowload it to view it again later ? Most websites hide their streaming content urls using javascript or other scripting languages and it is almost impossible to detect the url of the stream manually. Thankfully mouser coded the tool url snooper which does this work for us.
I don't like the iTunes software, it is slow and I only use it for copying files to my iPod, never for listening to tunes. I discovered a winamp plugin that gives you full access to your iPod without iTunes, the plugin is called Winamp Media Library iPod Plugin. Once installed it adds the support to Winamp full or pro. I had to upgrade to full before I was able to use this feature but it is well worth it.
Widgets are small programs that add their small windows to your desktop and can be used from there. Widgets come in all colors and forms and you could categorize them the following way:
Thunder7 recently told me that he bought a used Xbox and discovered that the hard drive was full of music files from the previous owner. The original Xbox uses an internal 20 gigabytes hard drive to store save games, patches, music and images. The new Xbox 360 and Sony's PS3 will also utilize a hard drive and the following tip is also valid for them.
Kornie send me a a link to a great webpage that hosts hundreds of NES games that are playable in your browser. All you need is a java plugin and you are ready to go. They currently host 250 English games, 80 Japanese games, 10 prototype games, 25 unlicensed and 25 miscellaneous games.
Halloween - Hate it or love it. The time of the year when most adults and teens alike rejoice at the prospect of dressing like superman, the simpsons or south park characters. I tried to find costumes and accessories that could be made instead of just purchased, it does feel better to wear something that you created with your own hands instead of buying something that thousands of other people might wear as well; dont you think ?
