I’m a sucker for geek gadgets. Keyfob wifi-finder? Check. PVR set to stun? Check. Telnet on my cellphone? You better believe it.
Aleutia is one of the other businesses at Nonsense HQ. I borrowed one of their rugged, low-power PCs after seeing them knocking around the office.
The Aleutia E2 is a tiny Linux box that’s built like a tank, runs on air (almost) and ships for a pocketbook-friendly £199.
The CPU is about the size of four stacked CDs and weighs in at just over half a kilo. That means it’s small and light enough to mount on the back of the optional low-power monitor.
The E2 is built to be tough. It’s entirely solid state, using Compact Flash storage, and with a rugged case that feels like it could survive a parachute drop.
Unsurprisingly, Aleutia’s biggest fans at the moment are NGOs in Africa and Americans living off grid, but there’s plenty of room for a little imagination closer to home: file servers, print servers, you name it.
The machine comes pre-installed with your choice of Ubuntu or Puppy Linux plus Firefox, Skype, OpenOffice, a full dump of Wikipedia and a stack of other open source freebies. Everything works out of the box, so there’s no setup headaches.
The E2 uses 96% less power than a typical desktop, so can run from a solar panel or for a staggering 24 hours on a standard car battery. Even with a low-power LCD monitor, and power consumption is a mere 18 watts.
The E2 comes with a three year hardware warranty, thee years tech support and a money back guarantee. What’s not to like?
You can learn more about the Aleutia E2 care of Sky News:
Arden was a titan of British advertising, best known as the creative powerhouse at Saatchi & Saatchi during their boom years.
He was also entirely unknown to me when I first chanced upon his first book, a masterpiece buried beneath a clumsy title:
“It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be”
That title screamed ‘self-help for the feckless’. The cover’s clever-clever visual gag (“THE WORLD’S BEST SELLING BOOK… by Paul Arden”) irked me. The logo of the publisher, Phaidon, was the only element that caught my eye.
But that 128 page book – alongside the follow up, Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite – challenged much. Not just in my work, but in many aspects of my life.
Arden laboured to slay presumption, lazy thinking, cliche and orthodoxy. He illustrated a playful creativity to problem solving that was an immediate and lasting inspiration.
Arden wasn’t interested in peddling ideas. Instead, he demonstrated ways of thinking: the art of looking sideways, to borrow the title of another Phaidon book.
Like David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man, Arden’s advice is peerless. I have recommended his debut to dozens – perhaps hundreds – of people in the five years since it was published.
Not just to marketeers, but to journalists, research scientists, students, internet entrepreneurs, teachers, designers…
Arden passed away this week, prompting endlessly entertaining anecdotes in his Book of Condolence and broadsheet obituaries (see The Guardian and The Telegraph). These provide but a taste of the man’s genius.
Arden’s books shifted my thinking by ninety degrees. I hope they will continue to do the same for others after his death.
I insist you obtain copies by any means necessary.
The tool hit 1,000+ active users in a little over two weeks thanks to blog writeups, forum threads and StumbleUpon. That’s before I’d had a chance to start any “real” (read: planned and paid-for) marketing.
I’ve had a few dozen emails from users saying they love the tool. A handful have asked about a tip jar. At the moment, all the tool’s downloads are driven by word of mouth recommendation. So instead of a tip, perhaps you’d consider:
Blogging about the tool
Sharing it on your favourite social media site
Sharing it on your favourite geek forum
Telling your webmaster, SEO and domainer friends
Adding it to your email signature
If you *really* want to give me something, I have an Amazon Wishlist. Thanks for your kind words and support.
There’ll be an early April auto-update adding new registrars that users have requested (please tell me your if your favourite is MIA). Don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed or email alerts to keep up to date.
I buy a fair few domains. I’ll be reading, say, David Pogue in the New York Times, see a phrase used in context and wonder if the corresponding domain is available.
This gave me the simple idea for Domain Lookup. The extension lets you perform one click domain searches at your registrar of choice using the selected text in your browser window.
It’s super-simple: select the text for your domain search and hit the keyboard shortcut (CTRL + SHIFT + D by default). Alternatively, you can right click for the contextual menu and hit “Domain Lookup for…â€.
The extension will normalize the text, removing spaces and other illegal characters etc, then launch a new tab/window to search for the domain at your favourite registrar.
You can choose your domain registrar on the preferences panel (under Tools > Addons).
At present, the Firefox addon supports these domain name registrars:
1 & 1
123reg
DirectNic
DomainDiscover
Dotster
eNom
Fabulous
GoDaddy
Melbourne IT
Moniker
Register.com
NameCheap
NameScout
Network Solutions
UKReg
UK2
You can also set the TLD(s) you wish to search for:
.com
.org
.net
.info
.biz
.us
.co.uk
.org.uk
.fr
.jp
.de
.ca
.au
.ie
.ro
Looking for another domain registrar or TLD? Let me know and I’ll see what I can do.
3. Click ‘Edit Options’ and add QualityNonsense.com to your trusted domains list.
4. Try to install again once you’ve added QualityNonsense.com to your trusted domains.
5. After the three second wait, click ‘Install Now’.
6. Restart Firefox.
Privacy & Legal
The boring-but-important stuff:
1. The extension does not log your domain searches. Your domain data is only used to trigger a lookup at your domain registrar.
2. The extension comes without warranty either expressed or implied. Use of the extension is entirely at your own risk. Neither myself, Richard Kershaw, nor Quality Nonsense Ltd shall be liable for any damages arising directly or indirectly from its use.
3. The extension contacts Tools.QualityNonsense.com every day or so to check for updates to domain registrar data. This means I can add additional domain registrars and TLDs, and fix any problems that arise as registrars change how their sites work.
4. The extension logs anonymous aggregated usage data by default. You can opt out of this in the preferences pane. The only data collected is the number of installations and how often the extension is used.
5. The extension uses affiliate links for some domain registrars.
I take privacy seriously. If you’ve any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me.
Feedback
Comments, ideas or suggestions? I love them all equally. Specifically, I want to hear:
Which domain registrars do you want added?
What TLDs do you want added?
What could be improved?
Please post feedback in the post comments.
My army of beta testers deserve enormous thanks, particularly Aaron, Rob, Jon, Gareth, Stephen and Fraser. Thank you muchly.
Like Michael Moore on a budget, I was overcome with a faux-naif sense of wonder. Just why are Digg users so damn unpopular?
I decided to digg out (arf!) my natty deerstalker and use a little ol’ fashioned detective work to find out for myself.
My first port of call was the Digg Top 100 users list. Digg, bless ’em, are sufficiently embarrassed by the behaviour of this motley crue of geeks that they’ve stopped publishing the list.
Perhaps, I thought, profiling the most successful Diggers would offer valuable insight into their complex, analytical minds. After all, successfully judging a website without visiting it must require staggering reasoning skills. Those sub-tabloid headlines and semi-literate 20 word summaries don’t write themselves, you know.
I hit pay dirt pronto. I discovered that a depressing number of the Digg stereotypes are true, assuming the power users to be a representative sample:
89% are male
72% are American
68% are under 30 years old
73% live with their mothers*
(* Only one of these is made up. The rest are based on Digg profile info, FaceBook/MySpace/Pownce profiles, info given on personal blogs etc).
Unfortunately, the ’25 year old virgin’ stereotype was a little harder to test (unless some of the profile pictures are an indicator). So I started to take a look at Digg Power user’s ‘favourite links’ for more insight into this mysterious creature – and more importantly, their agendas.
At least three run shonky homebrew Digg clones (and I don’t mean Mixx.com).
At least three of the top 100 are employees of Digg or the cheap Calacanis clone Netscape Propellor.
At least four of the top 100 are spammers ‘social media experts’ who specialise in manipulating sites like Digg for pleasure and profit.
At least one Digg power user is active – for cold hard cash, perhaps? – on a spammy Digg clone called, er, PaydayAdvanceUK.com (I kid you not) owned by Canadian company Blizzard Interactive.
At least one is a grown man who loves Warhammer 40,000 and is happy to admit as much in public.
Understand now why this bunch of misfits might not be interested in Digging your content?
I didn’t always make money online to keep me in shoes. Once upon a time, I had “real jobs”.
I worked with some fantastically talented people, including Mr Blogjam and Ms Ladyshambles. I also worked with some real schmucks.
Many said schmucks worked for advertising agencies. Their common passions were overpriced Japanese trainers, permanent suspicious sniffles and an awful habit of talking at people. Mostly about themselves.
Very few of really understood the web, leaving me dazzled that buffoons could bluff with such success for so long. They’d use phrases like “thinking outside the box” or “blue sky thinking”, while I’d bite my tongue in lieu of explaining the irony of using cliches to illustrate creative thought.
These ad agency goons were not alone in failing to understand their medium of choice. At one startup, I proposed making bloggers the focus to launch a new service. The benefits of approaching bloggers were manifold: acres of free publicity, easy link building for web traffic and an army of potential early adopters to act as evangelists.
The downside? The CEO would need to clear a little time in his schedule to be interviewed by bloggers. He declined. Repeatedly. That year, said CEO cut cheques to the tune of £48k to a name PR firm. This generated one solitary, if substantial, write up.
That’s one piece of positive press in twelve whole months. From memory, this FT piece generated zero visible increase in user registrations.
So it’s always a pleasant surprise to see companies just *get it* when it comes to engaging bloggers. I can think of few more effective ways to build a buzz around a new brand.
Within hours of blogging about Swivel.com, I received an email from their CEO. He wanted to arrange a private demo to show me how Swivel could be used to analyze AdWords and AdSense data (watch this space).
I use myriad Google Alerts plus custom RSS feeds to track every mention of my websites and URLs on the web. I’m also playing with Track Engine as suggested by Eric Ward in his excellent Search Engine Land column.
What tools or methods do you use to help you build your brand in the blogosphere?
