aspratley

The Nordics are social democracies. Free market, liberal with a strong emphasis on social care. I'm not quite sure what your point is.

Where are you getting your 20 year figure from? There's a study which says 10 years but doesn't account for the energy/co2 required to refine oil. EV battery packs can also be recycled as grid storage.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. You don't need to balance the bike when you're stopped - you put your foot on the floor and wait. I know it's different in every country but pedestrians and cyclists frequently wait at lights. Are you more concerned about wasting time by not having right of way or do you find bikes fall over when you stop?

Issues that are probably bigger than "balancing" when you're commuting by bike are: access to safe cycle paths, getting sweaty before work and the weather.

It was also the week that a lot of Finns start their summer holidays so presumably a seasonal expectation as well. I'm sure a weak pound plays a part, but hardly breaking news.

Handling cash isn't free for a merchant. It has to be stored, counted, transported, banked, insured and it's easily stolen. Even though the fees aren't the same cash still has a fee.

I've done this on a small scale for web, never for mobile/apps though. My approach was a git repo containing the main code then a branch for each brand which only had config changes. It works ok but gets difficult to manage once your size grows - it's essentially using git as the build tool.

If I were to do it again I'd likely not use the branches for branding config, but keep them all in one place and use a build tool to make sure the required settings are in place and merged before deployment. As long as you tag your releases you can fix certain clients to certain releases.

Make sure you talk to your clients about what their branding requirements are. Some companies get very very specific about what they 'need' and as soon as you offer the ability to customise something they can get irritated if their brand doesn't look quite right. As others have said make all of these customisations part of a config file and just reference that in your code. Once you start making specific changes for a client your life becomes difficult and you end up managing a specific bunch of code just for them.

You didn't say if the white labeled app would be a public download of it it's intended for company staff. If it's the latter you can probably have a single app that gets configured on the first start up, i.e. it's blank when you open it, sign in and it pulls in the required config and then takes on the customer's brand.

There's also wkhtmltopdf.org as another headless/comand line pdf renderer

I think this is a common path for MBPs of the same age. I've got a 2009 model and upgraded the HD to SSD and memory a couple of times. The processor can feel a little sluggish but it still handles what I need it to. But that's not really special to macs. Hardware just got to the point where it was mostly good enough. Not being able to upgrade the new MBPs does make me think twice. Either I fully load it and pay the premium or risk feeling I need more of XYZ later.

Something I do like about my MBP, even after quite a few years of abuse it still looks in decent shape. The case, screen hinge and keyboard all still feel solid. Which is where lots of other laptops seem to fall apart. Though the battery and trackpad have seen better days. Something nice about macs is they are usually serviceable for quite some time, either via Apple or third parties - I needed a new power adapter recently and could walk into a shop and get a new one there and then. Trying to track down power adapters etc for short lived models from other manufacturers can often be a pain.

All in all I don't think it's anything magic about macs. If you bought a similarly specd and built machine from someone else you'd be in the same position.

You don't need an invoice for a company expense. How do you think people claim back for things bought in a shop?

I've been using Linode for production machines for about 4 years now and have been very happy with them. The security issues were a concern but appear to be the exception rather than the rule.

I've been using DO recently because I was given some free credit - mainly for testing Ansible. Their pricing is very aggressive and they do have that new fresh out of the box feeling.

I haven't used anything from them in production yet though so can't do a full comparison. Negatives for DO are they don't support private networking in all of their datacenters, they also don't pool bandwidth (as far as I'm aware) between all of your instances, I haven't seen any references to permanent/fixed IP addresses in the DO control panel - they seem to be dynamically assigned on each droplet spin up.

I haven't used DO support but Linode support has always been fast and accurate for me. For me, at the moment, DO isn't offering anything more than Linode so moving sites doesn't make sense in my case (disk IO isn't an issue for me at present).