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:

Paul Arden? Never heard of him.

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:

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.