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 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 ?
With all the rumors about an acquisition of youtube by Google circulation on many websites it was only a matter of time when the real deal was announced. This happened some minutes ago. Google officially announced the deal in a press conference that took place today. Youtube was acquired for 1.65 billion dollars in a stock-for-stock transaction.
Everyone in the world seems to have a digital camera nowadays and many seem to be happy using the software that came with the camera. I'am going to introduce some of the free products that I'am using with my camera - you might have heard about some already but I'am sure some are relatively unknown to most of you.
Many users just buy blank CDs and DVDs without thinking much about the manufacturer who created them - most want it cheap which has the result that their system has to cope with different media. They notice that their system burns some CDs and DVDs faster without knowing why. Your burner might have the specification to burn DVDs with 8x speed but your burning software offers you only 4x. This article explains why that is the case and what you can do to never make this happen again.
Soutpark goes World of Warcraft - many people think this is the best Soutpark episode ever. You watch our southpark heroes play characters on the alliance side of world of warcraft which confirms again that only kids are playing alliance in wow, hehe. It's the complete episode so rejoice and take your time to watch it, a must see for everyone who is playing world of warcraft.
Sometimes I create thumbnails of screenshots and include them in my articles to give you a preview of the subject I'am writing about. I normaly tend to use the print key on windows to make the screenshot and fire up gimp to reduce the size to be able to add it to the article. To be honest, this process takes way to long and I thought of ways to optimize it.
I'm going to show you how to create a secure usb data safe that can be used to store sensitive data. Secure means it is encrypted and will only be encrypted if you need the data that is saved on the stick. This method is also working with other removable media such as zip drives and hard disks.
Microsoft finally released the second release candidate of their upcoming Windows Vista operating system. Everyone is free to download the 32-bit or 64-bit version on the Microsoft Vista homepage. As always this version will only work 15 days if you do not have a key for Vista which you can get following this link, you need a windows live id - so signup to get one if you do not have it.
I've written a great deal about firefox and tons of extensions that have been developed for it but I've never done the same for thunderbird, the email client that is based on mozilla. I started using thunderbird about a week ago and imported all my emails from opera to it and I love this tool. It is fast, I can sort everything the way I like it and the spam mail recognition is awesome even without third party tools.
I watched the movie Crank last saturday in a cinema near my hometown, it was a great movie but something that happened before the film really annoyed the hell out of me. Why the hell are they showing clips that it is illegal to record the movie with cams and that you will face jail time for it before the movie starts ? How likely is it that someone who has the intention to record the movie is actually in there ? How much more likely is it that many visitors who paid lots of money to watch the movie are pretty annoyed by this message ?
Combimouse, a crossbread of keyboard and mouse looks pretty strange to say the least. On the one hand we have a patented and award winning design and on the other hand we have the users who will surely think twice before they give this a try. Let us see how this works. You can type normally and once you need to use the mouse you use your right hand to touch a certain spot on the right unit to activate mouse mode. This means there is no way to hit the keys accidentally while using mouse mode or move the cursor while typing.
Those of you who got a glimpse at Windows Vista might remember the explorer breadcrumbs feature which it introduced. Explorer Breadcrumbs for XP takes this functionality to Windows XP. After you installed the free tool a new toolbar is added to the windows explorer showing breadcrumbs. Those breadcrumbs are identical to the navigation structure, if you are opening for example e:\apps\opera you see the breadcrumbs Desktop > My Computer > E: > Apps > Opera.
While I was searching for a way to reduce the font size of my bookmarks toolbar I came across the extension UI Tweaker for Firefox. It felt strange that I've never heard about this extension before because it has some really nice features that change the appearance of firefox. The extension offers five tabs (Menu hacks, Toolbar hacks, Tab hacks, Findbar hacks and Miscellaneous hacks).
I have more bookmarks in that toolbar than Firefox was able to display which lead to the unfortunate situation that the last ones were not shown in this toolbar anymore. I was only able to access them using the arrow on the right side of that toolbar that contained all bookmarks who could not be displayed anymore. This was not a great situation and the first thing that came to my mind was to change the text of the bookmarks - identify the site with less text and you have more space for sites.
Jedi Concentrate is a very usefull application that fades out every part of the screen that does not belong to the active window. You can download it from the great website an app a day. The application is open source and uses only 44 Kb unpacked. All you need to do is unpack the application to any place on your hardrive and run it from there.
You see keyless doors all the time on tv, in series like 24 and alias for instance and every movie in which the military plays a part. They never have normal doors, they use keyless doors that work either by using fingerprints to identify the person and grant / deny access or keycards to do the same. It still sounds a lot like science fiction and I bet you never seen something like this on your neighbors door - so, why not be the first one who has this kind of device ?
Well this is just a little registry hack that changes the size of the thumbnails of images that are displayed in windows explorer by default. The default size is relativly small and most people surely would like a bigger size for the thumbnails to get a better preview of the images. To do that you have to add a new entry called ThumbnailSize to the following registry key:
I recently received some emails asking about the kind of hosting that I was using for ghacks.net and I decided that it would be a nice idea to write about it in an article. Ghacks is running on a dedicated server provided by the German company Hetzner with the following details: AMD Athlon 64 3700+ cpu, 2 GB DDR 400 Ram, 2x 160 GB SATA hard drives, unlimited traffic and Suse 10.0 as its operating system.
This topic has been covered before in my blog but I tend to take a look at older interesting topics from time to time and update them to reflect the changes that happened to the concept in the time between. One-Use-Emails, also known as Disposable Email Addresses and Throwaway Emails are really helpful when you do not want to give someone your real email address because you fear that they would abuse this information and probably sell the address to make a quick bug.
I started my gaming "career" on an Atari 2600 system with stunning games like River Raid and Pitfall, bought a C-64 later, then an Amiga and finally a PC. If your history looks similar you've come across many unforgetable moments and games - that is why I'am going to post this retro game article. Every game mentioned is free to download and play. I know that a top 10 is probably not enough because there are many great remakes out there but I had to limit my post somehow, therefor, it is only a top 10.
Songbird is a relatively new open source media player that is build from Mozilla and aims to revolutionize the media player market the same way firefox did to the browser market. Songbird is currently available in revision 0.2 "test flight" and runs on Windows 2000+, Linux and Mac just like firefox. Songbird comes with pretty much the same functionality as iTunes and more, due to the fact that it is based on the same core as firefox you can easily use songbird to browse between websites of radio stations, podcasts and blogs. Which means you play the songs and at the same time read what they have written in the same program.
