Yes, but OnShape is only “free.” FreeCAD explicitly allows you to retain ownership of your own work, without requiring it to be percolated through someone else’s cloud servers.

I will go back to carving things by hand out of stone before I rely on cloud based design tools.

Based on the popular trope of Hispanic guys hanging around outside of Home Depot (or other American big box hardware stores) every morning looking to get picked up as day laborers.

Indeed. Some of the seceding states had it written into their new constitutions. The post-hoc notion that this was not the case is laughably absurd.

I’ve always heard it called the “Lost Cause Of The South” by racist rednecks; they seem to be aware enough (or someone was, whoever it is they’re parroting) to attempt to distance it as much as possible from terminology that associates it with slavery because otherwise it looks even worse. Even though slavery is absolutely what it was all about.

This is kind of a bad example because, rhetoric aside, in various situations you can fight fire with fire and in fact it’s the best way to do it. I.e. controlled burns of areas subject to wildfires are used to lessen the amount of tinder lying around the place that could later go up in an uncontrolled manner. You can also put out an oil well fire by blowing the flame out with dynamite.

So to stretch the analogy further, maybe we ought to start focusing on what (who) ought to be controlled burned.

FreeCAD all the way.

The commercial CAD packages are all subscription schemes at this point which are designed around the dual purpose of extracting as much money as possible from businesses and nickel-and-diming hobbyists to death. The megacorporations that own them are actively evil and doing business with them should be avoided at all times.

Blender is not a CAD tool. You can bully it into kinda-sorta doing something that resembles CAD work with plugins, but that’s not what it’s for.

Sketchup is about the same caliber as TinkerCAD and LibraCAD is 2D only.

That leaves FreeCAD.

I’ll bet you it does, but you’ll need to put a new battery in it.

I bought it on Dealextreme back in the day, which was kind of the precursor to our current Aliexpress/Wish/Temu/Shein arrangement. It’s therefore possible that it is a knockoff (or a knockoff of a knockoff?) but the fact remains that it was absurdly cheap, is fully mechanical, and against all expectation and reason it continues to function and also keep pretty good time. It’s actually just a hair fast, and requires me to knock a minute off of it about once per week.

If you’re not squeamish you can get a thoroughly generic – or perhaps heavily “inspired” by some particular name brand – wind-up timepiece from any of the usual suspects for pocket change. $10-20, and other poster in here mentioned they bought theirs for $5.

That’s okay, I’m also unfirable and the highest paid person in the building.

Nice. It is astounding what you can get for just a couple of bucks, and even more astounding that they genuinely work.

I just took a more detailed look. They do still make quite a few mechanicals but they have indeed shot up in price. $80-90 nowadays, it seems.

My old one is definitely mechanical. I wind it up every morning.

It’s also approachably yet suspiciously cheap. I think I paid $20 for this close to 15 years ago, and Sinobi is apparently still at it making mechanical watches in the $30 range.

This one does two things: Tells you the time, and does so while not needing batteries.

If we’re doing watches today, here’s what I’m rocking lately.

I stopped using my Garmin smartwatch because they finally fell into the enshittification trap and recently tried adding AI slop and a subscription scheme into their watch app. That’s a big old nope from me, dawg.

Some dude named Tyrone apparently had my phone number at some point before I did. For a couple of years at first I got a sporadic but persistent litany of calls before I managed to finally convince all of his debt collectors, parole officers, and/or babymommas that this was no longer his number.

It sounds stereotypical, but it’s true. I thought somebody was pulling my leg the first time.

Anyway, I don’t answer my phone for anyone who isn’t on my contacts list anymore. If I don’t know you, you don’t need to be calling me.

I’ve posted this story in various guises before, but back in the '90s a friend of mine had a dedicated phone line for his modem (yes, this was before residential broadband of any stripe was readily accessible) which was the inverse of the local Dominos Pizza. Like, ###-###-0101 vs ###-###-1010.

Tons of calls from a wide cross section confused, stupid, angry, and belligerent would-be pizza seekers arrived at the telephone he had plugged into that line, and many many more must have gone into the black hole of the perpetual busy signal.

We had to constantly remind people not to leave their disks on top of the monitors in those days, because on some models the degaussing pulse was enough to erase a floppy disk.

I was also proud of my ownership of a large speaker magnet which had a highly directional magnetic field, and could cause tube monitors and TV’s go all paisley from about 20 feet away. I kept it stuck to the back of my steel garage door when not in use to keep it well away from all monitors, disks, and tapes.

It’s the only way to be sure.

It’s a great trio of games (Legends 1 and 2, and the Misadventures of Tron Bonne) with quite a bit of depth and if you ask me a fantastic art direction for their time. The one thing I will say is that the controls did not age very well. You get used to it after a while. These games predate modern dual-stick movement and aiming and use the shoulder buttons for strafing. I think the Playstation versions are superior due to the increased number of buttons available on the controller.

It is now. It wasn’t at first.

It was part of the Valve Orange Box and that was a big deal at the time. There was also a huge deal of whining from people who paid for it when Valve announced they were changing it to a free to play model.

To be fair, they haven’t managed to put out a whole hell of a lot that’s actually compelling in the intervening years that weren’t rereleases. “Hey guys, DAE remember Resident Evil 4? The good one? We just re-re-re-released it. And some old Megaman games you already have. Full price!”