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 Firefox Cheat Sheet is a great way to learn more about the firefox browser. New users will find this one page firefox reference useful because it lists all those little tips and workarounds that speed up your firefox workflow.
I love remakes, especially when they are fan made and not a companys effort to make easy money with a well known franchise. I never played the original Kings Quest series (was more into Leisure Suit Larry at that time) but enjoyed the remakes that have been released so far. If you did not know, there are also remakes of Kings Quest 1 and Kings Quest 2 availabe at the website of ADG Interactive. (free of course)
Adobe Reader is really slow when it starts. Did you ever try to view a pdf document that was available on the web ? The reader tends to load very slowly although the document itself might be only a few hundred kilobytes. This is bothering me and I suppose it´s bothing a lot of people who are using the Adobe Reader to view pdf files.
Xpy is a great little freeware application that lets you change windows xp settings with ease. The normal way of changing items would be to use a registry editor, search for the relevant key and change the value of that key. Xpy aids you by offering options to change many settings with a simple click of the mouse button.
There have been lots of articles lately that explain how to secure a wireless network. Most of this articles contain at least one measure that is not enhancing security at all. This does not neccessarily mean that it is lowering the security on the other hand though. Let us take a look at the six dumbest ways to secure a Wirelss Lan.
The Music Industry (from now on only called MI) is putting a lot of pressure on the consumers. They release copy protected media but fail to realise that this is a punishment for the people who buy music. Even if you don´t download music from the internet you most likely know sources where to get that music for free, without DRM and in high quality. The commercial pirates as well don´t care about copy protection.
Everyone knows how to send and recieve emails but only a few understand the concept behind the process. Emails are normally not send directly from your machine to the recipient. Mailservers that are setup by your ISP for instance process incoming emails and send them on their way. This information is stored in the headers of the email. Understanding email headers helps you identify spam directed at you.
Yesterday we witnessed the release of Nexuiz, an incredible freeware online shooter. Today it´s a free survival game that looks and plays a lot like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Penumbra sets you on a quest to find out more about your father who bequeathed you a mysterious book. Graphics and gameplay is great for a freeware game, make sure you grab your copy from the developers homepage.
Nexuiz is a free online shooter developed by Alientrap. A new version of the shooter has been released today and is available as a download (around 200 megabytes) from the developers homepage. The game Nexuiz is a classic Deathmatch Shooter like Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament. Chose to play different maps, select different weapons to frag your opponents. Graphics are great for a free game.
It is sometimes a good idea to keep a local copy of a website on your hard drive. A reason could be that you fear the website will be taken offline in the near future and you want to save valuable information. Another one could be that you want to save it on a computer that does not have internet access all the time.
Microsoft released a pdf file called MSRT - Progress Made Lessons Learned yesterday which provides an analysis of the data that the program reported when scanning computers. The tool itself was executed more than 2.7 billion times on at least 270 million unique computers since January 13th, 2005. The tool has removed more than 16 million instances of malicious software which means that on average every 311th computer was infected.
Microsoft released a beta version of their upcoming Microsoft Vista operating systems a few days ago. I don´t think it´s wise to install a beta version of a microsoft os as your main operating system:dual booting is the solution. You want to experience Vista and still be able to return to XP or whatever other operating system you are using ? Fine, follow this easy to understand guide to dual booting.
Safe XP which is developed by Theorica Software is a freeware application for Microsofts Windows XP operating system. It requires no installation at all and is ready to run once you unpacked it into a directory of your choice. The software makes it easy to change some security related settings of the following elements: Services, TCP & Ip and Netbios, Internet Explorer 6, Media Player, MS Office XP & 2003, Start Menu, Windows Messenger and Network.
Extended Statusbar is another useful firefox extension which adds functionality to firefox. It displays additional information about the website that is currently loaded. Those information include the overall load time of the website, the amount of bytes that have been downloaded, the speed that you downloaded those bytes, the number of loaded images and finally the percentage that the site is loaded.
It is a well know fact that files that are deleted by normal means can be recovered with ease using so called file recovery utilities. This might not be a problem for most users but it surely is not nice if you sell a used computer and someone discovers private pictures, account data and the like on the formatted hard drive.
Microsoft introduced Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) just a month ago to Windows XP users. Once installed it checks if the running Windows XP version is genuine. If it´s not the it´s showing annonying popup messages. It´s Microsofts decision that only popups are showing, they could easily change this to force a purchase for example at a later point.
Firefox can save your login details to websites, online banking or forums with ease. The next time you enter the same website it will autofill the details and you simply have to confirm the details to sign in. This is convenient of course and great for the lazy ones. The paranoid ones will most likely be unconvienced by this because it´s easy to display the password in plain text.
The football worldcup is starting today and it surely is going to be the biggest sports event of this year. We all know that some companies are going to stream the worldcup live on the internet for their countrymen. If you are not that tech savy and still want to view the cup online your best bet is to download a software called pplive. I suggest the stable version but experienced users could use the beta version as well.
If you are crazy enough to try a beta version of Microsofts upcoming operating system you might want to head straight over to microsofts vista website and download a version for either 32-bit or 64-bit. You will need a Microsoft Live account to download windows vista. You can also order a dvd that will be send right to your home.
I sometimes stick lots of post-its on my monitor that remind me of upcoming important tasks. This is looking rather messy and I was looking for an alternative. A note is that alternative. The freeware lets you add post-it like notes right to your desktop. You are free to chose a color for the note, setup an alarm with sound or change the font of the note. You are able to change almost everything The notes can be uploaded to a database to use them from more than one computer. (for example home and office pc)
Visual Task Tips is another little freeware application for windows xp which displays a preview image if you move your mouse over a folder in the taskbar. Simply download the 90K file from the developers homepage. After installation you have the option to run it and add it to your windows startup files. To disable it again you start it again and it asks you if you want to disable it.
Nettools is a small freeware utility that plays a sound whenever a website that you specified changes its contents. All observered websites are also cached on your local hard drive. The tool has two other features: A web search option and a dictionary lookup. Great tool, really tiny (180k). Grab it while it´s hot.
SQL injection is a security vulnerability that occurs in the database layer of an application. Its source is the incorrect escaping of dynamically-generated string literals embedded in SQL statements. It is in fact an instance of a more general class of vulnerabilities that can occur whenever one programming or scripting language is embedded inside another.
Some tv stations, like the BBC in Britain, will provide their fellow countrymen with an opportunity to watch the football world cup 2006 in germany live in a streamed version from their webpages. They said on their webpage that "The service will be available to UK broadband users and will mirror terrestrial and interactive coverage." I assume it is free of charge but maybe my loyal British readers could enlight me how they plan on streaming the content.
You might remember that I wrote an article in late november called Beginners Guide to securing your pc. You might even remember that I suggested that there was no need for a desktop firewall at all. And you might even remember that I got some pretty bad comments about my suggestion in the comments section.
EasyCleaner is a small program which searches Windows' registry for entries that are pointing nowhere. EasyCleaner also lets you delete all kinds of unnecessary files like temps, backups etc. You can search for duplicate files and you can view some intresting info about your disk space usage! You are also able to manage startup programs, invalid shortcuts and add/remove software list.
Now this is a nice idea. If you install the firefox extension Googlepedia your google search results will feature another column showing a related wikipedia entry. It uses your local wikipedia as default and disables the showing of google adwords on the search result page. (That´s the area where the wikipedia entry is shown).
The football worldcup 2006 is taking place in Germany and will start in exactly six days with the opening match between the host Germany and Costa Rica. Would not it be great to have a listing of all games, all teams, all kick off times and live results ? Sure, you can visit a website of a local news site and hope they update the scores in real time or you could try the excellent firefox extension called FootieFox.
Mini Explorer is a tiny little freeware application that can be started from everywhere. Its small size of only 92K makes it a blazing fast alternative for the built in Microsoft Windows Explorer. Let us take a look at some of the programs features:
Let me introduce the smallest desktop search program available. Snowbird Xp is small, only 26K in size and fast at the same time. Just download and run it from whatever location you like. Snowbird does not index search results which has the advantage that you will always recieve up to date information. Some features have been updated in the new release, amongst them is the capability to search in word documents and excel spreadsheets.
A Beginner's Guide to What Goes on Inside that PC published by extremetech a few days ago tries to explain the components of a personal computer without the "geek" language. It aims at a audience that did not have the time or desire to understand how a pc is working. The eight-parts article begins with an introduction and goes on by encouraging everyone to take a look at their own pc. (After saving all work and the like). It would be a good way to print the article to be able to read it and look at the turned off computer at the same time.
I thought I publish some tricks and tips for myspace, they include: How to hide personal information, How to hide and make a profile private, How to hide your friends section, How to Hide Comments, How to Hide the last login and How to Hide Extended Network.
The guys over at techspot published a large article on tweaking winamp. They focus input and output plugins but cover other areas as well. The recommended Shibatch mpg123 input plugin for instance offers better audio quality and more features than the default nullsoft mpeg decoder.
Stalkerati is not your usual search engine that lets you search for long lost friends, relatives and the like. It instead tries to accumulate as much data about a person as possible and save that data in a neat profile on their website. It collects data from various sources including myspace, facebook, friendster, a web and blog search and finally a photo and image search.
Krunch is a nice little service that offers you the option to upload and compress files in three different formats (zip, rar and gzip). After compressing the file you have the option to download it for yourself and mail it to other recipients either with a download link to the file or directly as an attachment. The service offers the option to upload and decompress a compressed file in the formats zip, rar and tar.gz. It seems to have problems with my rar files though.
Press CTRL + ALT + DEL, what do you see ? The windows taskmanager with lots of processes, showing a filename like svhost.exe and a memory usage of that process. Besides checking for trojans, spyware and virii: What´s a good way to check for possible causes if your computer behaves slowly ? Right, the taskmanager. Unfortunatly the process don´t give you lot´s of information which application did cause them to run on your windows version.
This is a neat little trick that should work with most phones and phone service provider. You simply enter a code in your mobile phone that reveals the unique serial number of it. If your phone gets stolen you report the theft and the serial number to your provider and they have the means to make the phone useless. That means no one will be able to use it, at least not for phoning.
If you´re ever in the need of a high security password the Ultra High Security Password Generator Website might be exactly what you´ve been looking for. Everytime you visit or refresh the website it will display three randomly generated passwords, one 64 random hexadecimal charakters password, one 63 random printable ASCII chars and finally a 63 random alpha-numeric characters password.
LogMeIn is another service that gives you remote control over a computer. It uses a java applet that has to be executed be the computer that should be controlled and a website that gives you control over the computer (or more than one) with the applet. That means you don´t have to install software or use a usb stick to run programs on the other computer, you simply open a website and control the computer at home.
A new public beta of Zfone has been released a few days ago for windows xp, linux and mac os x. Zfone uses a new protocol called ZRTP, which is better than the other approaches to secure VoIP. "(ZRTP) achieves security without reliance on a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure), key certification, trust models, certificate authorities, or key management complexity that bedevils the email encryption world," Zimmermann explains.
