UbuTab Case Study: How to be Taken Seriously
I was taking a look at the ubutab which is supposedly an upcoming Ubuntu/Android tablet that failed to meet its indegogo campaign goal last month. A couple of things about this site just make me sad. I see a lot of shady businesses with no SSL during checkout, no real email address, and a lazy themes for their site all the time. I am not sure if they are just lazy, don’t care, or a combination of both. This post is really a PSA. The 1990’s are over. People expect a higher level of quality in your product, your website, and your brand. If you are launching a new product here are a few tips to be taken seriously.
Use a Real Email Address
Use an Email Address at your own domain. It is not difficult to have a custom domain for your email address. Gandi gives them away for free when you purchase a domain. Having a custom domain instead of free email makes your company seem more legitimate.Don’t Send Customers to Paypal
Use a payment processing system or at least something like stripe that it integrated to your website instead of redirecting users to a paypal checkout page that sends their payment to a company that has a different name from your own. This is just silly. I would love to have a tablet that runs Ubuntu. But this entire operation just screams scam to me. It will be interesting to see if they actually release a product later on this year.Update:
It looks like the actual site was taken down. You can see an archive of the site here.Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
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Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- A eulogy for Vim from Drew DeVault's blog
- Pluralistic: AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (11 Mar 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Avi Alkalay: Uniqlo T-Shirt Bash Script Easter Egg from Fedora People
- Offline 23 hours a day from Derek Sivers blog
- Pluralistic: California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (28 Feb 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- On Alliances from Smashing Frames
- Acting ethically in an imperfect world from Smashing Frames
- Diffusion of Responsibility from Smashing Frames
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7
Anthropic are the only major AI lab to publish the system prompts for their user-facing chat systems. Their system prompt archive now dates all the way back to Claude 3 in July 2024 and it's always interesting to see how the system prompt evolves as they p...
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries April 18, 2026You Can Message Me From My Website Now
I came across a rather interesting idea (via Intial Charge): I added a widget to every page here that lets anyone in the world immediately send me a notification. Type a message, hit send, and it’ll...
via Chris Hannah April 18, 2026Rhea Finance exploited for $18.4 million, some recovered
Rhea Finance's lending product was exploited for around $18.4 million after an attacker took advantage of a bug in the platform's slippage protection feature. The stolen assets affected both platform and user funds.Some of the stolen tokens were returned b...
via Web3 is Going Just Great April 18, 2026Generated by openring