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 article "Ten things every Microsoft Word user should know" is for those of you who are still using Microsoft Word (and not Open Office or similar freeware products). I think most companies still rely on the Microsoft Office productline, also many computers come preinstalled with an OEM version. You get a great explanation and guide for every tip that shows you how to use the feature described.
I found a tutorial on the techarena forum that had some nice (standard) tips on how to speed up your windows operating system. You find tips that increase boot and shutdown speed, some that increase the overall performance by disabling certain services and features like indexing service and system restore. If you never tweaked your system before this article is for you.
Some ISPs are beginning to throttle bittorrent traffic. There is a possibility to overcome this throttling by encrypting your bittorrent streams. Torrentfreak.com posted a guide which tells you how to encrypt your torrent streams with three popular clients: Azureus, Bitcomet and µTorrent.
Tracing a Hacker is a article aimed at beginners that want to learn the basics of finding out if there is someone connected to their system who should not be connected to it. It gives a rough introduction to some basic concepts like tcp/ip, ports and how hackers find their targets. This is a good read if you don´t know what they are about. After that Omar starts of by explaining the netstat command which lists all the sources that are connected or currently connecting to your computer. If you are running p2p software this can be a lot of connections. I suggest you start of by disabling most tools that you might be running while on the internet. So, no p2p, no messengers aso.
The article essential utilities at laptoplogic.com lists several freeware utilities that should be useful to everyone who owns a notebook (with an intel cpu that is, a guide for amd will follow). All tools mentioned can be desribed as system tools that either show system information, test hardware or tweak it. For example tools to test the notebooks memory (Memtest86) are included as well as dead pixel tester for the lcd screen.
This is the follow up to the proxy filtering program Calamity. It provides a fully customisable way of filtering out unwanted proxies via control files, a proxy tester to check anonymity - and a fully functional search engine crawler to find lists of posted proxies. Included within the kit is a php checker which can be uploaded to your own webspace to spread the processor load and bandwidth of the actual testing. This is fully integrated into Charon where it will simply send your pages lists of proxies and harvest the results
So you have installed that nifty messenger and have not used it for some time. Now is the time to use it again, there is just one little problem: You can´t remember your password. Creating a new account would be an idea but what if you want to keep your contacts ? Messenpass reveals the password for various instant messengers, among others are: MSN Messenger, Trillian, Miranda, Gaim and AOL Instant Messenger.
I want a freeware utility to do the following. Did you ever say that to yourself and wondered if a freeware or open source application existed that did exactly what you wanted ? It seems the natural way to sort freeware applications in this way, describe what you want to do and link to a freeware application that does exactly that.
Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement) for Microsoft Windows personal computers. The freeware application supports many programming languages like C, C++, Java, C#, XML, HTML, PHP and Javascript. It has many useful features that Notepad is lacking, some worth mentioning are auto completion, the ability to work with more than one document and a multi-view feature that shows two documents at the same time. (that you can edit of course).
A lot of my visitors already have a google gmail account or are asking me for an invitation. I thought it would be nice to share a great site that features lots of gmail tips with you. The site gmail tips the complete collection gives a rough introduction to the google mail service and lists more than 40 tips afterwards. For example tip 27 explains to you how you would add a hotmail email to gmail, tip 11 tells you how to connect securely to gmail.
You might still remember the little firefox tweak that reduced memory usage when minimizing firefox. Gomeler.com has some more tips that optimise firefox even more. Lets take a look at them, shall we ?
A new version of the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool has been released as well yesterday. The new version is able to remove infections by specific prevalent malicious software. It´s able to detect 64 infections, that´s three more than the previous version. The three new infections that are detected are Locksky, Reatlle and Valla according to the german newsmag pcwelt.de.
Linux has a bad image when it comes to gaming. Most games are developed for windows, sometimes a linux version will be released as well but most of the time this is not the case. The site games for linux lists many games that are available for free for a linux operating system. Every game has a screenshot and some basic information like size and website of the maker included. Every game is rated by its users which should give you a first impression of the quality of the game. Unfortunatly no hint is given on how many users have voted for the game. Nevertheless it´s great as a first indicator for the game.
Until now I´ve heard a lot about the music service pandora offers but I never happened to test the service myself. Well, I tried it today and have to say that the concept itself is fantastic. You tell them a song or artist that you like and the service tries to find similar artists using characteristics of the artist or song. So, if you enter The Beatles for instance you will be connected to a radio that plays music that offers the same characteristics as the Beatles.
Lots of people are demanding more proxy sites because many have already been banned by their school or workplace. It´s not easy to find new ones but maybe the list from econsulting might help you. They have a list of 250 web proxies that might not be banned. I think it´s worth a try if you are that desperate.
Angry Ip Scanner is a small open source application that lets you scan IP addresses and ports, you can even specifiy the range of the scan by yourself. After pinging the target IP it is able to resolve other data like hostname, MAC address and open ports.
So, you are sick of World of Warcraft, of Battlefield 2 and Counterstrike Source ? You want to experience something new ? You´ve come to the right place my friend. I found a site that contains an extensive, and I mean extensive, list of many, and I mean many (hrhr) games that are free to play and concentrate on multiplayer experience. I don´t think it´s possible to test them all but you might just test all games that look interesting and fit the category of games that you like most.
Wikibooks is a great service that collects books that are freely available. The bookshelf (aka the listing of all available categories) provides links to categories like computing (and its subcategories like Programming languages) and Humanities and in those categories descriptions and links to those books. Some categories contain subcategories that contain the links, for example the programming language main category contains lots of subcategories that contain all the various programming languages.
Coolmon is a great little freeware application that monitors and displays various windows settings. Among the information that can be displayed are Processor usage (up to four CPU's) , Number of Processes , Number of Threads, Process using the most CPU time , Processor type , Used/Free/Total page file , Used/Free/Total RAM , Free/Total/Grand Total Disk space (up to sixteen disks, also mapped network drives) , Computer Uptime , Date & Time , Computer name , User name , All IP addresses , Network read and write speed (up to four NICs) , Total Bytes sent and received and Battery status.
Notify is a small freeware application for windows that monitors files and directories that you specify and notifies you when those are changed. The small size of 15 Kb makes it an ideal background task, it uses almost no cpu time and little memory.
Tweakguides have a large article about firefox tweaking which not only explains the basic settings of firefox but also advanced settings which can be edited by entering about:config in the firefox address bar. The guide is divided into 12 chapters and starts with an introduction which helps you get in the right mood for the article. After that the optimization chapters begin with chapter 2 essential optimization and an explanation of many basic firefox settings. You learn a lot about firefox and those early chapters are clearly aimed at novice users who did not put much thought into the configuration up to now.
Most people think it takes lots of work to encrypt files. The freeware click crypt 2.6 allows to encrypt and decrypt files with just one click. It´s unfortunatly only available in german but that does not matter a lot because the interface is simple and easy. Click on Download Sofort ausführbares Setup which starts the download. After that install the software on your system and start it. This opens a configuration window which is named Verschlüsslungsmethoden. You select the encryption algorithm that you want to use, you have three options, those are: MD2 (128bit), MD5 (128bit) and SHA (160 bit).
Todays world is becoming a wireless one. If you signup for a new internet provider you have most of the time the choice of a modem that uses cables and one that is wireless. Now, most people tend to chose the wireless one because their homes don´t look that messy after all, cables everywhere seems to turn certain people off quite a bit.
Lot´s of people complain that webproxys are not working at their works / schools computer because they have been banned by administrators. A way around this would be to setup your very own proxy server that is being hosted a) by a free webhosting service that supports either php or cgi or b) your own website that is being hosted by a webhosting company.
I know that I have not been updating the proxy list for a while and I promise to do it in the near future. For now, I post a list of new […]
I don´t think a lot of my visitors are still using the Microsoft Internet Explorer but there are some that do. My first advice would be to change the browser immediatly to firefox or opera, for those who are to lazy or have other reason to keep the insecure browser the IE Proxy Changer is a nice little addition to the internet explorer.
Igowerf from the anandtech forum posted a rather large list of freeware that can replace commercial products from the same category. For example a replacement for Microsoft Office would be of course Open Office which is free to download and use. It is a great list with lots of different categories that include Office, Internet / Networking, Graphics, IDE's and editors, Audio/Mp3/CD, System tools, Video encoding/decoding/etc, 3D Modeling/Animation/etc and Misc suggestions.
This is a great help. The Advanced Dork Firefox Extension allows you to highlight a word or phrase, right click and choose one of six provided Advanced Google Operators intitle: inurl: intext: site: ext: and filetype:
Now this is an interesting analysis of password recovery speeds. It compares password length and chars used to the time different computers need to bruteforce the password, ranging from Class A (speed of a pentium 100) to Class F (supercomputers, large scale distribution) computers.
Dylan Tweney compiled a list of 101 fabulous freebies for the pcworld website. The link above leads to the category view of all freebies that dylan collected. Categories include Tune Up: Utilities and system tools, Lock It Up: Security/antispam tools, system-stabilizing utilities and Share It: File sharing and storage services. All categories include program links and a short description of the program itself. Lots of known tools but also some lesser known ones and also some services are included.
JDiskReportenables you to understand how much space the files and directories consume on your disk drives, and it helps you find obsolete files and folders. The tool analyses your disk drives and collects several statistics which you can view as overview charts and details tables. This is a great tool if you are looking for a program that analyses your hard drives content. Shows lots of useful information like which filetypes use the most space on your hard drives, file modification and folder size.
Maybe you are like me, thinking why there are so many linux distributions out there and what the differences between them are. It´s hard to make a selection, there are hundreds of distributions out there and all seem to serve a purpose. This could have been the intention of the guys who wrote the overview of the ten major linux distributions.
Well I came upon this analysis of .com domain names in this article by Dennis Forbes called Interesting Facts About Domain Names. He takes a look at .com domains only because this is the most thought after domain extension worldwide. Some interesting conclusions that he draws are that the chances of catching a two or three letter domain name are exactly zero, unless you pay a brooker for it of course and that the chances to register a short domain name start with four-letter domain names.
I´ve written about virtual computers before and found a nice way program to make the same method available for virtual software installations. Altiris Software Virtualization Solution lets you install every kind of software in a protected environment that prevents access from this software to your core system. This is great if you want to try out some new alpha / beta software or software that you are suspicious about.
It has been a long time since I wrote the first article about Disposable Email Address Services and I think it is time to update the old article with new services and get rid of dead ones. Before I start listing several websites and services that allow you to use "one-use" email addresses I will shortly explain why everyone should have at least one service at hand all the time.
I´am back. I finished moving to my new apartment and can again write article and entertain you. Autohotkey is a nice little freeware application that has many purposes. Take a look at its features:
I´am in a hurry because I´am moving to my new appartment today and don´t have the time to write much, because my pc of course goes with me to the new destination. I thought I post some interesting articles with a short description to keep you entertained while I´am moving.
Are you planning to purchase a new computer in the near future ? You are also someone who builds the computer on his own, someone who does not rely on retail computers that might have parts that are not the quality you demand ? The gotfrag price guide might be a good starting point if you answered both questions with yes.
UltraShredder deletes sensitive files by overwriting them with random characters, saving it to disk each time, and then bypasses the recycle bin, thus acting as your personal, portable file shredder. If the file were to be recovered by a data recovery program, they would only be able to see unintelligible characters on disk where the file used to be. The program is a great tool to destroy sensitive data, and is very small with a minute memory footprint, and makes no changes to your system whatsoever.
I know I have some freaks among my readers that like to use an usb stick to have some of their beloved applications at hand or start them from their for security reason. Wikipedia.org has a nice list of portable applications that can be run from a portable device. Every application is sorted into one of nine categories like Networking and Internet, Password management and Document editing .
