Starting up a business is difficult. We’re doing it now, and we thought we had everything under control. So, we really do understand where you’re coming from.

For that reason, we want to start a weekly post on Friday’s we can call “Financial Fridays”. It’s aimed to offer some business advice — mostly financial, and give you a place to put a “beggars” link up in the comments. This could be an advert of a special you have going on, a donations button, links to some freelance articles you have to sell, etc. The best things to link us to are the places where we don’t have to buy anything. Such as, you getting paid for page views on a Yahoo! Contributor account or some such. Other good things to link are things from an affiliate account.

So, lets get on that. Link me! ;-)

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Posted on 24/May/2013 by

New to the store

Posted on 21/May/2013 by
Healthy noms

This gallery contains 8 photos.

A few months ago, Grace approached Gabbie of Gabrielle’s Creations for a holiday Etsy trade. After all, with scrumptious jewellery like this, wouldn’t you find a reason to wear it? With Gabbie’s request, Grace opened the food science section of … Continue reading →

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Make Magazine is holding their Make Camp again, and this time it’s going to be on Google+. It’s going to be from July 8th to August 16th, FREE, and fun. While it’s designed for teens, I’m pretty sure big and little “teens” can also get in on the action.

For those of you that are home schooling, librarians, museum coordinators, etc., you can even integrate Maker Camps into your program! Check out their website for more information.

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Posted on 21/May/2013 by

Things are squaring away here at Insanitek, and soon we’ll have the ability to talk budgets and actually hiring people. The first round of hirings will go to people that will help increase the website potential and/or the store.

What does this mean?

It means that freelance writers, DIY’ers, and merchants. See our careers page for more information.

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Posted on 20/May/2013 by

Motivation Monday: Minimalist problem solving

Posted on 20/May/2013 by | Leave a comment

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Posted in Information, Inventor tools

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Updates and updating

Posted on 16/May/2013 by | Leave a comment

There are a couple updates that are going on right now within Insanitek’s community that you ought to know about.

  1. Dreamhost, the server, has routinely been having issues. This causes the whole of Insanitek to go down for periods of time. We have no control over this, but we do apologise for the inconvenience and aggravation. Trust us — we are just as annoyed that we’re paying for an unstable and unreliable service at the moment. (Thankfully, it’s not usually this bad.)
  2. We are trying to find a way to implement a “point system” within the community that will enable you to earn points for being involved. You see, when we have a healthy, active, robust website, it ranks higher up on web searches, enabling us to become a better company and resource for inventors. For that, we want to reward you with points that you earn for commenting and being active in the forums (on top of being able to sell things in the store) for cash, gift cards, or physical items, such as magazine subscriptions to Science or what have you. We’re currently trying to find a system that works. Until then, you may see things come and go.
  3. We are also working out a couple kinks with the projects page (linked from the home page) and a few other linking issues. Please be patient with us while we get all sections of Insanitek all linked up nice and neatly for usability. It’s going to take some effort. (In that vein, if you’re good at Word Press coding, and would like to get paid to help, please step up! Send your CV and letter of intent to gconyers{at}insanitek{dot}net if you’re interested.)

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Posted in Insanitek News, Insanitek Updates

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Interestingly enough, today is the 2nd International Fascination of Plants Day. To celebrate, Taylor and Francis is granting free access — for today only — of relevant articles. Enjoy the free access while it lasts!

Oh, and of particular interest is this article on the deforestation of ancient Turkey. You should recognise a name in the author list there. Yep. That’s our fearless leader! Here’s a couple of her pictures from the trip:

100_0278 100_0295100_0155

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Posted on 16/May/2013 by

Early today I received an email that made my day a lot lighter.

FREE ACCESS to Influential Articles from Environmental Communication…

To give you a taste of the content in Environmental Communication the Editors have highlighted a selection of influential articles to aid your research. These articles reflect themes and ideas that have recently been in the media.

These articles have been made FREE for you until the end of the year.

Featured articles include…

Don’t forget to share this collection with your friends and colleagues too!

Best Wishes,
Sally Day
Senior Marketing Executive
www.tandfonline.com

And now I have shared with my friends and colleagues. Enjoy!

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Posted on 14/May/2013 by

Awaken your inner caveman

Posted on 13/May/2013 by | Leave a comment

One of our network has changed their URL and website all together. They changed from www.flintstonetools.com to www.buystonetools.org. If you go to Flint Stone Tools, you’ll find that you are going to a completely different website that doesn’t reference the old website at all. We have received more than a couple notes that it looks like a scam website due to

  • The change in URL (not to mention the name of it)
  • The redirect from the original without seeing the warning
  • No mention of the previous page
  • No real information about the company Flint Stone Tools
  • The “slashed and unreasonably low prices”

We have been asked repeatedly if this was a scam. No. No, it is not. Despite the fact that it looks like one of those gold buying scams, it is absolutely not.

Our affiliation with Flint Stone Tools

Flint Stone Tools is not owned, managed or operated by anyone at Insanitek R&D. It is owned and operated by Al Seckel and Isabel Maxwell. Both are wonderful people that have asked Grace for her help in spreading the word about their product.

In case you didn’t know, Grace obtained her BA in anthropology and has a fondness for archaeology. She also has a love of teaching and educating. Flint Stone Tools combines these elements by selling authentic stone tools at really, really good prices.

How does Flint Stone Tools manage to offer such low prices for real (and legal) stone tools? Well, in Europe you can find these tools scattered throughout farmer’s fields, and the farmers don’t want them. They give Flint Stone Tools permission to gather the tools. Legally, these tools can then be sold.

Al and Isabel have been at this for a while, and they have thousands of tools. On top of that, they also have a passion for education and archaeology as well. This means they are not out for so much of a huge profit as they are providing quality museum and educational tools.

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Still not sure if you are interested? Allow us to begin awaking your inner caveman by linking you to some interesting sites.

Caveman Chemistry: a site maintained by a professor at the Hampton-Sydney College. It’s full of chemistry, but also links to a fun book on cavemen and the journey from caveman to modern technology.

Primitive Technology: a site maintained by the Primitive Ways Clan, a group of people that specialise in learning and utilising the old ways so they are never forgotten. Learn music, making fire, and making stone tools among other things.

Also check out Lab Rats, an educational program that teaches science in a fun, innovative way that kids actually like. They have affiliated themselves with Flint Stone Tools as well as well as have provided much of their teaching materials for kits and sets.

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Posted in Archaeology, Information, Partners, The Captain

The good, the bad, and the apology

Posted on 11/May/2013 by | Leave a comment

I need to tell you all a little tale about what happens when they let me free to clean up things on the forums and behind the scenes. This, of course, comes with a confession about how OCD on organised and clean I like things to be.

Well, I’m a little OCD on having things related to business clean, organised, and easy to find things. A couple months ago when we redid the forums and community, we had open registration for a short period of time. However, we didn’t have any method in place for keeping spammers out of registration. So, we had hundreds of spam-bots cluttering up the member list that I felt the need to clean out.

Yesterday morning I went through deleting the spammers that got through that round, only to have accidentally deleted the admin’s account, which broke the entire community. Oops. (The curse was actually much, much stronger than that when I realised the extent of my mistake.) Thankfully, Ali, my good friend and CIO, is patient with me. All he did was shake his head slightly and roll back the system a couple days.

This leads me to my apology.

I’m sorry that I screwed up, causing the website to malfunction. I’m doubly sorry if you had registered for a legitimate account, but I deleted you either in the process of my getting rid of all the junk earlier today or if you were deleted in the roll back.

The good news is that registration is open, and we have a good spam system in place. You may register at any time to the default roles of Subscriber for the blog and Spectator for the forums. This is exactly like before, so you’ll not see any change when/if you re-register.

Again, accept my apologies for my error.

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Posted in Insanitek News, Insanitek Updates, The Captain

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