Ron Mertens’ blog

A long time after I updated OLED-info’s design, I finally did it for my other older blogs – Spintronics, MRAM and ExpressCard. I think they look better

I just finished reading another book – The 4-hour workweek. My friend Costy recommended this one.
It’s basically about the ‘New-Rich’ – these guys are not rich in money, but rich in time. The author tells us that we should not work 40 years to enjoy a retirement – but rather have mini-retirements all the time, [...]

I’ve just launched a new blog (yeah… another) – this time on e-ink displays. E-Ink is used in book readers (and other devices) as they consume very little power and are very easy on the eye – it’s almost like reading a real book. The screen has no backlight (in fact it requires no power [...]

Have you ever heard of Link-Bait? The idea is to create great content, that will ‘make’ people link to you. One of the ideas used in link-baiting is contests…
So here I go – I published my first contest, at oled-info.com. Kodak has agreed to give one OLED photo frame (worth around 800$) to the winner. [...]

I just finished ready a new book ‘Building Findable web sites‘, by Aaron Walter. This is part of my quest to learn SEO.
So what’s my verdict? I’m not so happy with this book. The idea is good – talking about ‘Findability’, which is more than SEO. He defines the findability of a web site as

the [...]

If you know me, you probably know that I’m a big fan of Ray Kurtzweil. When I started playing the piano, I always wanted a Kurtzweil digital piano… I almost bought one actually (but never did). I later learned that Ray is actually friends with my uncle… He then started to send me signed copies [...]

I’ve always used Eclipse for my PHP coding. I decided to check whether it’s worthwhile to switch to a commercial editor… I checked a couple of editors (PHPEdit and PHPEd, what great creative names!) – and decided to stay with Eclipse. I didn’t like the ‘look’ of these two, and frankly I didn’t see any [...]

Abigail is 7 months today! It’s amazing how quickly it all went by, and yet how slow. She’s a totally different baby than she was just a few weeks ago – much more fun to be with, she’s laughing all the time, and everything seems to be new and exciting. 
 

 
I’ve also stumbled upon something fun [...]