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
If you are looking for a fast lightweight alternative to Adobes heavyweight pdf reader you might want to try foxit reader. A new version of foxit reader has been released a month ago and I decided to give it a try. Mainly because of the positive comments about it whenever I wrote an article about the Adobe Reader. So, why would someone want to use foxit reader 2.0 instead of the "official" pdf reader by Adobe ?
I´am not sure if most of you will like this article or not. My second computer was an Amiga 500 which I used almost 100% for gaming. I loved many of the games that came out for that incredible machine and still yearn for some of them. I always wanted to play those games again but did not want to buy an Amiga because of several reasons. I don´t want to get into to much detail but it´s mainly a storage problem and a problem of availabilty. Sure, you can buy some cheap amigas on ebay and probably buy some games there as well, but most of the games are hard to come by this days.
AntiVir is probably the best free antivirus software. It´s free for non commercial use and updates its virus definitions regulary just like in the professional version. The free version however has the habit to display a advertisment popup after each update, which normally means that you see this ad every single day. It is always the same ad and I don´t see a reason for this at all, once is fine but everyday ?
When I bought my first mp3 player years ago I had to somehow transfer the music from my cd collection to my computer. I was lucky enough to find CDex pretty fast and I stick with it since then. It offers everything that I demand from an CD ripper, it´s fast, it checks CDDB for album and title information and is able to save the music in many formats including mp3 and wav. All you need is the program itself and the dll lame_enc.dll which you can download from rarewares.
Firefox, and all other browsers as well, offers two methods to display pdf documents. The first displays the pdf file in firefox itself and uses the Adobe Reader plugin to do so. The second method would start the Adobe Reader itself and display the pdf file there. The first method might be convenient but has some disadvantages that I would like to address.
If you are using firefox on more than one computer you might want to take a look at the password exporter extension. What if you want to login into your favorite website and can´t remember the login details ? Would not it be great to synchronise all saved passwords between those computers ?
Most people use easy to remember passwords that are as easy to brute force. The name of your wife, your birthday, a combination of personal data or simple words like password or god. This might be convinient and nice as long as no one tries to break into your account. When this is happening you will quickly realize that insecure passwords are a big security thread.
Phishing is a popular method to capture personal data such as passwords, transaction numbers and credit card details. The company I´am working with locks several user accounts each day to prevent harm done to them due to phishing. It normaly starts with an email asking you to update your profile, to download a security update or a email that reveals that you are the highest bidder of an ebay auction (that you do not know about).
Nonsense. That was my thought when I first read the articles " Music industry demands the right to sue ISPs" from the Independent Online Edition and "Indie Labels want copyright shift" from the BBC Online. Several trade organisations including the Association of Independent Music (AIM), the Musicians' Union and the MCPS-PRS Alliance proposed that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should be liable for illegal filesharing by their users. (which means that it would be possible to sue ISPs because of this liability)
You are leaving traces on the computer you are working with unless you are using a live cd or software that runs from an usb stick. Traces are everywhere and it´s rather hard to clean every possible trace by hand. Disk Cleaner is a nice little freeware application that helps you in this task.
Yes I do own an iPod Nano with four gigabyte space. Was using iTunes for a long time until I wanted to copy some songs from the iPod to a computer and realised that iTunes did not offer that function at all. I decided to look for alternatives and found the freeware Yamipod which is really great and has all the functions that I need.
Coral CDN (content distribution network) might be the solution if you can´t reach a website because it is either blocked by an administrator, slow or even completly unreachable. Filters and restrictions become more common on the internet. Schools and workplaces blocking access to unwanted sites and networks is a prime example. I can understand that a company does not want you to surf at websites like Ebay during worktime but what about breaks ? What if you are in school and some class did not take place and you would like to check your mail accounts ?
You might have stumbled upon this site if you ever had a computer related question that you could not answer. First step, ask google. Second step, find websites that force you to login or even pay to see the answer. Big thanks to eonestudio for making this little trick public. The above link displays a video which shows how you can take a look at the answers for free.
You probably already tried the new firefox 2.0 and think it adds some great value that you would like to use immediately. Anti-Phishing enhancements, a built in spell checker, the ability to restore sessions and to undo closed tabs are great additions. If only those damn extensions would work with the new firefox 2.0 as well.
Shame on me that I did not discover this firefox extension earlier. Selenium IDE is a firefox extension that is able to automate, record and playback tasks in firefox. It has therefor more than one purposes but here is a great one that you will like. Many people do the same tasks when they start their browsers, check their webmail accounts, log into a forum they visit and check for the latest items on ebay for example.
Don´t you hate that boring Windows XP boot screen ? Would not it be nice to have a great skin for that screen ? If you answered the questions with yes bootskin might be exactly what you are looking for. The freeware makes only temporary changes which means that after uninstallation all settings are back to default value.
I´ve written an article about disposable email services in march and I suggest you go there if you are looking for a list of one-way email addresses. The system is pretty easy to understand. Many services on the internet demand an email address for verification purposes. Sometimes you just know that they will sell your email and you will recieve lots of spam afterwards.
Well well well. The industry tried their best to make the new competing high definition formats blue-ray and hd-dvd as secure as possible so that no one would be able to view them with insecure hardware or would be able to copy the movies. The files themselves are protected by AACS which stands for Advanced Access Content System. HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) makes sure that high definition playback is only available if the output device (television, monitor) is HDCP capable, if not the movie will be downsampled to 960x540p.
Most mobile phones are locked and can only be used with sim cards from the provider that sold you the mobile in the first place. The operator is able to unlock your mobile for you so that it is working with other operators as well, but you will have to pay for it most of the times. Would not it be great if you could unlock the phone by yourself without paying money for it ?
Have you ever uploaded a movie to Google Video ? You can chose one of 38 categories like sports or business for the movie. Now, when you visit the Google Video page again you only have the option to click on a few categories on the top. There is no option to search most of the 38 categories: Until now.
Automatic Acoustic Management is a feature of most modern hard drives which reduces the seek noice at the cost of perfomance. Most hard drives have this feature disabled but it is possible to enable it using a tool like silent drive which runs on Windows Xp and 2000 only. Please note that silent drive is only working with IDE drives at the moment and that the gui is in german.
I find this rather interesting and thought I give you some insights. Google Checkout is a new google service similar to Ebays Paypal that you can use to send other people money over the net without a bank transaction between the two parties. Checkout went live a few days ago and Ebay was quick and reacted agressivly by not allowing their buyers and sellers to use Google Checkout as a method to close the transaction.
Microsoft apparently released a new piece of software called private folder today. The software creates a folder called my private folder which can be password protected to keep the prying eyes of your loved ones from finding files they should not see. Windows Genuine Advantage will check twice if your computer is running a legit copy of windows xp.
Linux users are still laughing at windows users who were never able to experience how powerful a virtual desktop system might be. You have two options if you work with more information than your desktop can display. First, you could buy a second monitor and connect this one to your pc providing that your graphics adapter supports two monitors. Second, you could use a virtual desktop application that emulates a number of desktops on one monitor.
What a great little freeware application. Seconfig is only 37K in size and can be right from the location that you decided to unpack it to. The freeware has three main functions: Restrict Lan-like access, Service settings and TCP/IP settings. You may disable netbios, SMB and RPC over TCP/IP in the first, those are major entry points for worms and hackers.
You all know windows genuine advantage (wga) which checks if you are running a legit copy of windows xp on every startup and when you try to download certain tools and updates from the microsoft website. Microsoft confirmed that only 80% of all WGA failures are caused by pirated keys which means that about 20% are not caused by pirated keys.
Maybe some of you do like cycling and watching the Tour de France. I found a live tracker that displays every stage of the tour de france. Shown on the map are of course start and end of the current stage as well as information about mountain and sprint stations along the way.
If you are by chance collecting email addresses or keen on recieving a free @msn.com email you might want to take a look at the following page. You are normally not able to get a msn email unless you purchase their internet service. Click in msn email for free to visit the website where you can signup for one.
If you think that your IDE hard drives are slow you might want to check their transfer mode by going into Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager. Click on IDE ATA / ATAPI Controllers and right click the primary ide channel (and secondary ide channel if you have hard drives there too) and select properties from the menu. Select advanced setttings from the tab and check the setting under current transfer mode. If you see Pio or a low Ultra DMA mode you might want to try the following fix to increase the speed of your drive(s).
The multimedia player Bsplayer has been released as version 2.0 today. I was using previous versions of bsplayer and was really satisfied with it. It had some minor problems and I made the switch to VLC media player and plan on using that one even though the new version of bsplayer has been released.
Funny. I made the switch from BitComet to uTorrent two days ago and was using the first release candidate of uTorrent 1.6 with great pleasure. It´s faster and uses less system ressources than Bitcomet.
I´ve been using the Stumble Upon firefox extension for some time now and must say that I´am very pleased with the extensions progression. After installation it can be activated by either hitting CTRL + F11 or using the View / Toolbars Menu. You also have to create an account at their website and select some categories that you like, e.g. shareware, windows and bizarre.
You just signed up for this cool forum where everyone is having a great signature and you desperately need one as well. My advice would be to visit the coolsig website and take a look at their signature archive. Categories include People and Society, Oddballs, Humor and Geeky Signatures.
Every passing day makes it more likely that the registry file contains obsolete entries that might make your system unstable. They could also slow down your system. It is a good idea to check obsolete entries in your registry from time to time and remove them to keep the unnecessary entries to a minimum.
I thought this was kind of a joke when I read this story a few minutes ago. We read about Will who is recieving a newsletter from paypal although he never dealt with them whatsoever. He looks for a way to unsubscribe and finds no other than to log into his account (which he does not have of course.)
The question that always comes up when I´am talking about the benefits of download managers is why would someone need to use them at all. This can´t be answered in a hurry but my initial response is always the same. First, download managers are great time safers if you download many files from a server that allows only a few connections from the same IP. It´s tiresome to wait until one download is finished to start the next.
This extension is a great time safer. Whenever I wanted to upload an image to add into my article I had to fire up an external ftp client and use it to upload the image to my ftp space. This extension adds a full features ftp client to firefox, this means you can add an unlimited number of ftp hosts, transfer / delete / rename files, set passive mode and much more.
Updating your computer is almost complete. You must restart your computer for the updates to take effect. Do you want to restart your computer now?
This message pop ups at the end and immediatly gets the focus, even if you are in a game or watching a fullscreen movie. You have the option to restart now or later. The first would result in an immediate reboot while the second would nag you again in 10 minutes. This will be annoying if you can´t reboot your computer at that time.
I´am not using bittorrent that often anymore but it is still a great way of transfering large files. You see less complaints of people about low download speeds but certainly there are some that are having troubles downloading at a great speed. This can be of course torrent related, if you don´t have many seeders or only seeders with low upload speeds you will experience a slow download.
What´s running 2.2. gives you an insight look into what is running on your system. It is completly free to use for non commercial usage and includes information about processes, services, modules, connections, drivers, startup and system. You can control everything with what´s running, e.g. start and stop services and processes.
