>What's the equivalent of "Google it yourself" these days? When you ask something of somebody, the expectation of the other side to drop everything and do work for you isn't always appropriate/balanced/appreciated.

One of the hardest things about taking on any sort of leadership role (even unofficially) is that you need to allow others to do things. It feels incredibly stupid when you have to ask someone to do something you are more than capable of doing better/faster than the other person, but if you did that all the time you wouldn't have time to do your other work. Sometimes that includes questions that seem lazy, but part of asking the question is for the other person to acknowledge that they have thought about it and/or to ensure you aren't stealing ownership from someone.

They did recently increase their storage from 10GB to 20GB (along with a price increase from 30 to 36EUR/year). They also have had catch-all addresses as long as I've used the service, you just setup an email alias for it.

I wouldn't say it is easier than expected though, logging in, changing your email, confirming the change, and then making sure the password manager was updated was a bit of work.

The tapping out thing can be so confusing, even as someone that uses transit a lot. I was traveling recently and encountered buses where you had to tap in only, ones you had to tap in and out on, and ones where you had to tell the driver where you were going before tapping in. None of which had clear signage on the bus itself.

Even with my home system, at the airport I noticed they had installed extra stickers covering up the wrong way gates, and I had to tell someone where to tap their tickets when their entire family was blocking my way to the platform when trying to get home.

I recently flew and the airport had gotten the new scanners since the last time I had gone somewhere. The signage was confusing as only some of the lines had signs that specifically said you didn't have to take out your electronics on "this lane only". Even with the new scanners they were pulling out half the bags for additional screening and only had one person doing the additional screening.

Coming back from overseas I saw how it was supposed to work, walked up and they directed me to a line and a specific bin loading station, had someone remind me to ensure my pockets were empty, walked through the scanner and my bag was already waiting for me, took all of 2 minutes.

When I make stews I'll often make a concoction of tomato paste, soy sauce, fish sauce and Worcestershire sauce to massively boost the meatiness of the stew without making it taste like any of those ingredients in particular.

I've recently had to deal with a problem where the parent company has dictated 100% production testing for a spec that we meet for the spec sheet but customers practically don't ever need. But since the parent company test their products this way they say we have to. I've been very vocally against this because it has delayed us shipping products that are otherwise ready, prevented starting new products, and added a lot of production cost when our RMA rate without the test is something on the order of 0.01% and most of those are due to installation errors, not true failures.

I dislike this statement. Hardware is as hard as the product dictates it needs to be. A 25 component PCBA and a clamshell of 2 injection molded parts is about as simple of a product as you can make. Heck, most people would just buy an off the shelf clamshell for that type of product.

That doesn't work for the vast majority of products, building a product with 20 COTS parts plus 60 custom tooled parts, and 4 complex PCBAs is what is hard. Getting everything to fit together, pass testing, arrive on time from dozens of suppliers, etc. it where the complexity comes in. Then consider that hardware is cash intensive, you need to pay ahead of time for all the tools, you need to pay to buy the individual parts and warehouse them somewhere while you build the products you hope are going to sell. If something goes wrong there, then your expensive parts are just sitting there waiting for replacement components before you can ship. Then even when you ship, that revenue goes into buying the next round of parts you are going to receive in 3 months. This is where many hardware projects fail as they run out of cash before the project breaks even.

I'm actually surprised to hear that GoPro is used in aerospace applications. I assumed that they would use cameras from companies like Teledyne that have a more industrial/military customer base. That is to say, there are almost certainly options for domestic camera manufacturers if required.

You are right about China. The West (especially Apple) taught China how to manufacture while losing the ability ourselves and for some reason didn't consider that they would figure out how to design products themselves and bring the entire product chain within the country.

Individuals at the end of the day mostly care about buying the cheapest thing that does the job. They don't consider where it comes from. Even those that do care have limits in how they will compromise (there is a reason why I bought Bambu Labs 3D printer even though I would have preferred a Prusa).

I got so frustrated with Tidal recently that I finally sat down and finally setup a media player on Linux to play my locally saved music (most of which is from What.cd).

I'd even go so far to say that Shenzhen is probably the wrong place to build the electric train motor above. I bet there is some 2nd or 3rd tier city somewhere in China that specializes in just that. For example, the only reason I'm aware of the city of Yueqing is because I did a project with pushbuttons once and that is the pushbutton city in China.

I've traveled all around Asia visiting different factories for projects over the years. After some time, factories just tend to blend together, big rooms filled with machines where materials come in one end, and are modified to be more like the final product at the other end. The rooms might look/feel different, whether it is the dirty floors and heat of a die cast grinding room, the green floors of an injection molding factory, or even a clean room you have to squeeze yourself into a bunny suit for (They never have large enough suits for me), its all just equipment in a room to transform material.

A factory is also a set of people and processes, which is what truly matters. If you don't have good people with expertise and the processes in place you don't have a chance at getting good product. You build relationships with the people at the companies and they will move mountains to help you. You build a truly excellent relationship with a factory, and they will anticipate your requirements and sometimes ship you perfect parts at T0.

I've got plenty of examples of factories that are fantastic, and ones that have been horrible from my time in working. The good ones all have the same differentiator, people that we have built a good long term relationship with. The bad ones almost always have a constant rotation of different people you have to talk to.