eggfriedrice
It's definitely too easy to put off publishing until it's "properly" done and then it never happens.
We spent oodles of time on it, learned lots, build a fairly simple product but ended up selling it through some of the bigger RPi retailers. It was all an excellent learning experience, and ignoring our time we made about 50p out of the entire batch of a thousand. Factor in our time and it was a complete financial disaster, but we were young and carefree and had fun doing it!
At least they painted it grey to match the sky...
I like Jon's example here, a single and fairly short file that does just enough to demo this all, nice.
I don't remember this much, but a previous me wrote a guide for lasering using Inkscape for Edinburgh Hacklab. I don't think the process has changed much... https://wiki.ehlab.uk/inkscape_for_lasering
Once it was up and running most snapshots took a few minutes to sync, always finished before the morning anyway.
Definite +1 to rsync.net, this was >15 years ago but it was always 100% solid, I don't think I ever had any issues. It's nice to see they're still doing the same thing and haven't bloated it with crap!
There's a fake "house" at the end of my street. It's actually a telephone exchange: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@55.9050155,-3.2075701,3a,75y,...
There's normally an Openreach van or two parked outside, which gives the game away, but driving past you wouldn't notice.
My favourite is Dewer Place sub-station, despite the fancy frontage it was purpose built in 1894 as a sub-station: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@55.9465325,-3.2112386,3a,75y,...
I went on a tour round a few years ago and it was notable for using Gas Insulated Transformers, which are unusual outside of Japan if I remember rightly. There were amazingly strict planning regs that required the installation to be super quiet, so the building had a surprising amount of sound insulation.
A few things stand out, like the old-tech ring binders and Windows 95 screensavers on CRTs. The safety focus was clear. Nothing was done without a risk assessment, and the young apprentice who was helping with our tour was given a telling off by the tour staff as he wasn't holding the handrails - as had clearly been drummed into them.
What really struck me was how many people were involved in running the plant. I don't know how it compares to similarly sized gas plants, but there were hundreds and hundreds of people employed - mostly in project management/safety roles. I wonder how it compares to how many folk are employed in renewables, we have a lot of wind power here now.
It's a shame that cracks have started to form in the reactors so the plants will be shutdown earlier than planned. It looks like tours are suspended for Covid, but go round if they open up again before shutdown!
Plus, debugging, woo!
I assume it must be their massively scalable Kubernetes + NoSQL DB + CDN infrastructure.
They've done a whole lot of educational work with the project to get kids (and adults) excited about engineering, which can only be a good thing.
A friend of mine with a similar business in a different field tried outsourcing that a few years ago and it didn't work well, I didn't really understand why until I started.
We sometimes pre-configure gateways and devices for customers, so we need to pull them off the shelf and work on them first, then pack all the other stuff they ordered into the box and ship it. It's invaluable having the stock close to hand.
My solution - hire someone to help with the logistics.
We don't have the Things Node yet, but we do have the Things Uno (EU) which is a really handy dev board for experiments.
We started out with Shopify, but that's actually really limited in functionality unless you spend many $100s per month on apps to add basic stuff (like VAT handling). We switched to a self-hosted shop, which feels totally old skool but is working out pretty well. We're happily charging cards and shipping stuff all over the world.
Our thing is knowing the products and providing support, so I think that has some value. If you want a boxes shifted cheap then Amazon's your answer. Anything cleverer, then specialist retailers still have some real value.
In Scotland prescriptions are "free", i.e., I don't pay anything for my inhalers, or anything else prescribed by my doctor.
This costs the Scottish health service £1.3bn (https://www.scotsman.com/news/bill-for-prescriptions-in-scot...). I don't know how sustainable that cost will be, but I don't hear anyone complaining about the policy, except for opposition parties.