Considering that you can pickup free portable chargers at trade shows, they must cost next to nothing to source. The LED adds a little bit more to the price but again not much. The whole package is very cheap wholesale and can probably be marked with whatever brand you want if you ask an Alibaba vendor. The $20 comes into play when it reaches the store. The store has already bought them from some company that bought them from China so there's already a slight markup there and then the store adds a little more. They know people will buy them and depending on what kind of store it is, can charge a little more if they know their customers well. A Walmart-like store isn't going to be able to sell them for too much above cost but a specialty bike shop can mark them up more since their customers are already spending higher prices. A specialty bike shop might even order them with custom branding, adding a little more to the final price.
As for something like the Ikea bulb in the article, it includes an RF module that isn't that cheap. It costs about $7 per 1000 pieces. Maybe they get it for $5 or $6. Add in the slightly more expensive housing, it look like a halogen bulb but is LED, and then add in the cost of a quality RBG LED and the rest of the components and markup to get $15. Ikea does win out compared to other store for things like this because Ikea is buying the units from themself. The Ikea Sonos speaker is the only thing I've ever seen there that wasn't a pure Ikea product. They really have mastered horizontal and vertical integration.
If you are salaried, your 40 hours a week is just the minimum. Some employers respect the 40 hours, some expect you to work well past that number until the job is done.
Some people I work with have made very complex Excel "machines" that have been in use by many people for decades. One of the new engineers spent about six months porting one over to MATLAB and there were all kinds of magic numbers in the formulas that turns out were there to account for some bugs in some test equipment we bought 20 years ago. We had purchased a new system that would output data that wasn't compatible with his old model so the new engineer ported it over and now we get clean, consistent results. This is for antenna measurements so there's really been little advances in decades in the fields. The advances only really exist for antenna simulations.
The restore CDs that the OEM included with the computer still had all the crap baked into it. You needed a retail copy of Windows and hopefully someone hadn't ripped the OEM key sticker off the computer.
An A-Z character string written inside random page a book stored at a relative's house is a super easy way to secure a physical backup of your private key. You could even get clever and encrypt the key using some memorable passage of another book. Since the book passage is unknown to anyone else and be selected from a near infinite pool of paragraphs from the entirety of all published books, it would be impossible for someone to bruteforce even if they found the book where you stored the encrypted key. This would be an easy enough process to generate the ciphertext and store it in the event that you totally lost access to all of your electronics, online accounts, and home.
In VA, if you want an alcohol license for your restaurant, you are required to print an ad in a local newspaper stating that you intend to get a license. I'm guessing it's so some prohibitionist can call up the ABC and complain? It's completely ridiculous. I wondering what will happen when print newspaper ceases to exist.
“all-synthetic aerosol to replace tobacco smoke, if
necessary … I know this sounds like a wild programme, but
I’ll bet that the first company to produce a cigarette
claiming a substantial reduction in tars and nicotine …
will take the market.” (Philip Morris,1958)
It's interesting that idea is exactly what we are talking about today.
RJR tried doing smokeless cigarettes in the 80s and 90s but they apparently tasted like a fart. They still sold them up until 2015. It seems to work somewhat like a hookah, a hot carbon tip is used to heat air before it passes over the tobacco. Supposedly these kinds of cigarettes were the only ones you could still consume in the RJR office.
You can just buy counterfeit anti-tamper stickers but if there is a switch inside the unit that flips a bit in some sort of write-once memory, then that would require removal of an entire chip and replacing it with another that may not be 100% the same. You can have a chain of trust in the system where chips will only talk to each other if they all spit out the right hash. Bury the SPI/I2C lines you use for this trust check within the PCB so you can't access it without drilling the card and add a layer of anti-tamper traces that trigger another tamper event if disturbed. Now what was just a quick install has turned into a whole PCB rework job where you are having to swap all the chips with a virgin set, assuming you can't get your hardware in there prior to final assembly.
Use an AES256 key from the factory to hash the chip's burned-in serial number and the time from the RTC. Lock out JTAG interfaces so once the chips are burned, they are inside their own fortress. There are a ton of ways to really lock down the hardware other than a shiny sticker and weird screws. Those keep people from breaking their own hardware, anti-tamper tech in chips keep out bad guys.
As for something like the Ikea bulb in the article, it includes an RF module that isn't that cheap. It costs about $7 per 1000 pieces. Maybe they get it for $5 or $6. Add in the slightly more expensive housing, it look like a halogen bulb but is LED, and then add in the cost of a quality RBG LED and the rest of the components and markup to get $15. Ikea does win out compared to other store for things like this because Ikea is buying the units from themself. The Ikea Sonos speaker is the only thing I've ever seen there that wasn't a pure Ikea product. They really have mastered horizontal and vertical integration.