Ron Mertens’ blog

It’s been a while since I wrote last… things are kinda busy – but all is good. Noga and Abigail and both growing quickly, and it’s fun to be a real family. Although it’s also quite challenging at times (usually these times are around 5AM in the morning). Next week Abigail starts her summer vacation, and we’re all taking a week off in a small village near Jerusalem (together with Michal’s sister). This will be fun hopefully!

The nice guys over at APUS watches sent me an OLED watch for review. So now I’m wearing this weird and cool looking watch that has a small blue AMOLED. Check out my full review here.

Tags: oled watch, two girls

Great news – Michal gave birth to Noga, a beautiful little baby girl, on Saturday. Everybody is fine, and we’re already back home…we’re a real family now.

Michal was brave as usual what with the birth being all “natural” and all. Abigail is also behaving ok, I think she’s happy to have a little sister (or she might be hoping we won’t keep Noga around too long).

That’s it for now. Time to go to rest.

Usually I get around 200 spam messages a day to my gmail account.  Once every 2-3 days I go over them, and usually I find one or two real messages that gmail mistakenly marked as spam.

Today I went over about 500 spam messages, and found over 20 (!) real ones in there. Including e-mails from  LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo and others.  Very strange. I guess Google are tweaking the spam-filter, and they’re not going too good a job – I prefer spam messages in the my inbox than real messages in the spam folder! Some of these were really important.

If you’re using Gmail, I advise you to go over the spam folder… you might find interesting stuff in there

Here’s some interesting facts, comparing e-readers (Apple’s iPAD, really) to regular books:

• One e-reader requires 33 pounds of minerals and 79 gallons of water. A regular book requires about 0.6 pounds of minerals and 2 gallons of water.
• Making an e-reader requires around 100 kw/h of energy (around 66 pounds of co2). A normal book needs 2 kw/h.
• If you buy a book online and have it shipped 500 miles (by air), the transportation creates about the same pollution and waste and actually making the book. Driving 5 miles to the bookstore (and back) causes 10 times the pollution and waste!! If you use your e-reader to read lot’s of books, it’s quite a difference…
• If you read a book at night for an hour or two, the light bulb will use more energy than it takes to charge your e-reader.

More over at e-reader-info.com

I’ve just finished yet another environmental book: The Ecology of Commerce (by Paul Hawken).  The book is from ‘93, which makes it rather old (can you believe it’s almost 20 years since ‘93?) – but it’s still excellent and highly recommended.

The main thesis of this book is that the markets today are not efficient, because we are externalizing costs: health costs, cleaning costs, etc.  Anything that is paid by someone else and not the company that makes the product. In fact our markets today are optimized for companies that are good at externalizing costs. For example: let’s say we both make a TV. My TV plant uses a lot of bad chemicals that I throw in the garbage. These create health problems and need to be cleaned up, but I’m not the one paying for the cleaning or the health bills- the local authority and your health insurance is the one that has to pay. So in fact we are all subsidizing the wasteful plant.

He compares Organic food to “normal” food. He says that actually Organic is cheaper to make, because it does not destroy the soil with chemicals which gets to our water and food (not to mention Organic is healthier, and can actually produce more food per acre eventually). He also says the same about cigarettes. Did you know for example, the 1/3 of the fires caused in US homes are because of cigarettes? and you know why? because they contain special chemicals that keeps them burning. He claims that the cigarettes makers should pay for this, not all of us who do not smoke. Obviously the same goes for health issues – we are all paying more because of the smokers, and because the companies deliberately use dangerous and addictive chemicals.

He raises some nice ideas on how to advance towards a “sustainable economy”. He is in favor of Cradle-to-cradle which is rather a hot topic today. Another idea is to raise high green taxes and use the money to lower income tax. That’s a great idea. Think about it – we can raise electricity prices by 1000%, and then give the money back by lowering taxes. So eventually you’re not worse-off (at least not in average), but you have a HUGE incentive to cut your electricity usage. The same can be used for water, gas, etc.

The book is a bit depressing in parts, as all environmental books tend to be… but go ahead and read it. Like some reviewer said : “the book is a must read for anyone who cares about living”…

Tags: ecology, economy, Environment, green

Today I have released a new feature on picoprojector-info: a buying guide, complete with 2 nice tools (feature search and side-by-side comparison). There are over 50 pico-projectors on the market today, and these tools can help find the best ones for your needs.

This has taken me over 2 weeks. Most of the time has been spent upgrading Drupal from 5.x to 6.x for all my sites. Version 6 is great, and enabled me to do those tools much easier…

Tags: drupal, pico projector

Technorati (a popular blog search engine) has ranked OLED-Info in the top 1000 blogs. It’s currently at number 928. It’s also on the top 100 gadget blogs (number #76). The blogs are ranked according to their Authority, which measures a site’s standing & influence in the blogosphere. The ranking is updated daily and has a very short window, so the blogs ranking changes quite fast.

It’s nice thinking that at least today there are only 927 blogs that have more authority than OLED-Info in the whole world…

This isn’t surprising, but still sad. When you buy your next cheap gadget, think about this.

It turns out that Apple’s ‘overseas’ suppliers are cutting corners ab it. 54% of these factories have failed to meet Apple’s maximum-hour work week. And this is a 60-hours (!) work week we’re talking about – over half of these factories have longer weeks that that!

The are also paying below-minimum wages, employing people younger than 16 and failing to respect anti-discrimination rules.

Apple are obviously ‘very upset’ – but what can you expect when you want to be cheap and ‘competitive’?

It’s time we started thinking about the true-cost of our consumer goods…

More info over at Engadget

Lately Michal is praising creativity all the time.  It turns out that being creative is good – not just because you invent startups and become rich – it’s also a great way to channel your energy, to overcome emotional and physical problems. In short – it’s really important to be creative. You don’t have to actually be good at it: you just have to practice it, really. Dance, play music, invent silly songs, write, paint, whatever.

There’s an  interesting (and funny) lecture by Sir Ken Robinson, talking about this very subject. His main point – being creative is extremely important, but our school system simply kills our children creative drives. This is rather sad. And most likely he is right. It’s not just that school put a low emphasis on things such as arts and dance – the grade system is also very problematic.  If you’re not good in music – you won’t do music classes. That’s horrible, ain’t it?

As a parent to a girl who’s going to school soon (4 years is not much time, eh?) I thought about it, and I don’t have a quick solution. I don’t want her to not attend school at all. But I want her to remain creative. I guess, as always, that Michal and I will have to support her in this – give her confidence enough to remain creative, even when teachers and fellow students bring her down. I believe that the best way for parents to educate is by example. So I’ll try to be more creative (like, inventing 3 silly startups a day, not just 2).

Here’s Robinson’s lecture, worth 20 minutes – it gets better as he gets along (thanks Edan for posting this on FB):

“We need to radically change our view of intelligence”

Michal has posted about this a few minutes ago, but here’s my chance to write about Avatar, too. We’re back in Israel now, and a couple of days ago we went to see it.  It’s one of those ‘must-see’ movies, and I also wanted to check the 3D, of course.

Anyway, the movie is great! We really enjoyed it. Cool 3D, amazing visuals,  and a pro-nature message that hits the spot (makes you want to go back and live in a cave, really. Although where would you get 3D displays then, eh? those old caves barely have HD-Ready sets). I didn’t enjoy the music too much, and the song at the end was horrible. But other than that it was a great film! Go see it!

A lot of people ask me what’s new about the 3D in that movie. I mean, there was 3D TVs for as long as I remember, so what’s the difference now?.  The whole idea in 3D is stereoscopy: you display two images, one for the left eye, and one for the right – this gives the illusion of depth. In the old days they used color-separation: you had glasses that separated the image using color-filters. It’s cheap and simple, but the image loses color and it makes you feel a bit sick sometimes.

The new 3D uses ‘Active-Shutter’ glasses. They include small LCDs that only allow one eye to view the picture at any time (i.e.  block the right eye and then the left eye…). The TV (or projector) alternates between the images fast, and you get stereoscopy. The problem? You need a TV/Projector that can switch fast (you need at least 60Hz for each eye which means 120Hz altogether) and you need to synchronize the glasses, too (this means that you need a new TV that is 3D enabled). The glasses are also heavier and more expensive. And there are problems of cross-over if the TV can’t switch fast enough… but the whole thing looks great. That’s how they do it in Avatar!

There are also some newer technologies that allow glasses-free 3D displays. This is complicated, so don’t wait for such things to arrive at the home in the coming years.

You can read more about 3D displays in my 3D-Display-Info site.