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 think I found a reference to the blob game in the donation coder blog. The task of the freeware game sounds simple. Collect colors and use them to colorize the city that you are in. You, the blob, roll around in the city and absorb the colors of non player characters that roam the streets. Colors get mixed if you absorb more than one of them and run out after a certain time of rolling around and coloring objects.
Did you know that there are more emoticons accessible in Skype than the 56 that are displayed during chats ? I'm not sure why those additional ones have not been included in the menu where you can choose the emoticons. The only way to add them to your text would be to enter them manually.
Pandora streams music over the internet which is related to a artist or song that you have entered at the beginning. The service is great to find new artists that make a similar kind of music than artists that you like to listen to. The service was completely free until now.
The iPod becomes more and more not only a music and video player but also a multi functional player which is able to display subway maps, books and now the contents of wikipedia. Wikipedia on your iPod is a huge ebook which is available in English, German and Italian. The English version is the biggest one with 1.5 GB of data followed by the German with 550 MB and the Italian with 170 MB.
Most readers might think that it does not make sense to resize images online if you have a image viewer or image manipulation software installed which is able to perform the same task faster and without privacy concerns. I can only think of two uses where resizing images online would make sense.
Checking the bookmarks that I saved at del.icio.us was a boring and long lasting task until I found the little java application called fresh del.icio.us which automatically checks the bookmarks that are stored in an account. You do need the java virtual machine to execute the jar file. After that you only have to supply your login and password to del.icio.us and click on the Fresh button.
Sudoku is a addictive puzzle game which became popular in Europe just a few years ago. The goal is to fill the nine 3x3 grids with the numbers of 1 to 9 each and exclusively for the whole row and column. The concept itself is pretty simple but there are various difficulty levels that make it quite a challenge.
Don't we all hate those boring repetitious tasks that we perform everyday on the internet ? Open this website, log into that forum, check the ebay auctions, read mail accounts and rss feeds. Would not it be nice to start all of this with just a few clicks ? That is not the only thing that you can do with the Firefox add-on Dejaclick.
Most solutions that encrypt files require the installation of encryption software which has to be started again if you want to decrypt the encrypted files. A quick and easy way to encrypt text files would be to use the free Steganos Locknote program which encrypts text files using the 256 AES algorithm.
I have been using the Screengrab extension in Firefox 1.5 all the time. What it does is to save a website as an image. Everything is saved in the process which means that the image can become really big. I love it because I think it is so much easier and better to save a website as an image instead of saving the htm files with all the other elements using Save Page As.
I have been writing about the basics of finding a domain name and creating a blog on that domain name. It can be quite frustrating however if you are full of ideas and write great articles but either no visitors show up or the earnings are not worth mentioning. Not every blog has to be monetized. I know of some that use their blogs purely for reasons such as publicity, discussion or for a reference in their resume.
Spam free wallpaper websites are rare these days and it does not happen every day that I find a new one which has enough quality wallpapers to get a recommendation on my site. The dont love me website is one of those which really deserves it. They offer more than 2000 quality wallpapers in about 20 categories ranging from 3D over Girls to XP wallpapers.
I sometimes have the desire to create custom DVDs of movies that I own or that I downloaded to be able to view them on my tv using a dvd player. Many people might think that it is a rather difficult procedure to convert a avi file into a DVD compliant format and create DVD menus to be able to playback the movies on a standard DVD drive. This is not the case.
Windows reacts in a predefined way if you right-click a folder, file or blank space. It offers all kinds of actions such as Open, Delete, Add to archive and Send to which is a convenient way but I sometimes have the feeling that some commands are missing in that dialog. The freeware FileMenu Tools makes it easy to add new entries to the file menu by offering a set of predefined actions that can be enabled with a mouse click.
Etsy is a website where people can buy and sell (only) homemade goods. Everything is neatly categorized and accessible through various innovative methods such as colors where you choose a color and the site displays everything that is offered in that color. Anyways there is also the traditional way of clicking through categories like Furniture, Children and Weddings.
If you are using the nfts filesystem in windows xp you might know this registry hack to speed things up a little bit. The default mode is that every time you alter a file a timestamp will be saved which is for most users completely useless. Some backup programs or synchronizers use this feature but most others don't.
Would not it be nice to have lyrics for every song on your iPod to be able to sing along or look up some lines which were hard to understand. Canto Pod is a freeware application for Windows that makes it easy to add lyrics to most songs that you have on your iPod.
Do not Disconnect was implemented on Apple Ipods to prevent data loss by warning the user not to disconnect the iPod while it is still in use on the computer. This message should be taken serious most of the time. If you transfer files to the iPod for instance. Removing the iPod while transferring files could lead to data loss and file corruption.
Code Red Alien Arena reminds me a lot of the first Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena games that came out. I think I was addicted to Unreal Tournament in 1999 playing in a high skilled CTF clan for more than a year. It was tremendous fun and we were all pretty disappointed when the successor brought shiny graphics and shitty gameplay to the community. Alien Arena has nice enough graphics for a freeware game but the most important aspect is of course the gameplay. What can I say, it is fun.
I guess one of the following situations has happened to everyone who is viewing Divx movies on his computer. If you have experienced a frozen image with the sound still playing normally or pixels that distort the image then Divx Repair is the program that you could use to fix the errors automatically.
It sometimes happens that I delete a mail by accident because it does look like spam or a message that I do not longer need. Thunderbird does not display that message anymore if it is completely deleted from the mail client. Unknown to many Thunderbird does not delete the messages but flags them only which means it is relatively easy to recover corrupted or deleted mails. This method only works if you have not compressed the mail folders because compressing removes deleted messages from the mail files.
Welcome to the second part of the how to create your own blog with domain series. I would like to add some information about what I have said in the first part of this article. Hosting is essential of course but you should not be to afraid to make errors. I switched hosts three times before I found the one that offered me everything that I was looking for. The others decided to disable my website at a certain point because it was causing to much load and traffic on their network.
Readyboost is a new disk caching technique in Windows Vista which uses flash memory from flash devices to boost system performance. Caching system ressources for small, random I/Os in flash ram is faster than caching them on one of your hard drives which speeds up certain disk reads by the factor 8-10.
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.
