I revisited Assassin's Apprentice recently, as an audiobook, having read the series 20 years ago. Personally, I will not be continuing. The best term I came across to describe it is "injustice porn" or "misery porn." Fitz and the other protagonists are stymied and beaten at every turn, through the entire series (I checked summaries to see if there would ever be any payoff in continuing). If you're in the mood for an extremely depressing read with no positive outcomes, this is the series for you. I have been in that place before, but I have no tolerance for that at this stage of my life.

Yeah, second and third book in Farseer trilogy can be hard to consume, but at the same time in comparison Robin Hobb just damn can write good. It's little-bit in comparison if you read some more amateur writers, coming back to this.. Can't say it's wholly perfect, but it is well written -- Nighteyes for one. Fitz can be emo, but Nighteyes just delivers.

There sure are positive outcomes in Elderling series. In the long run. The characters and their life. It's not easy laid back reading, but in the end it is one of the best series. (Minus the four books of "Dragon ...", these are slop, not sure why Hobb wrote those).

Jeff Hays is an incredible narrator. It appears he only narrates LitRPG. Of which, DCC seems to be basically the only readable series. Would love to see him branch out.

That is odd. Most audiobook narrators narrate anything they are paid to.

I guess he really likes litrpg and gets plenty of work from that genre, perhaps? Maybe as he achieves minor fame from DCC he will find broader opportunities.

Sleep brokenness is ecosystem-wide. My Thinkpad crashes/freezes during sleep 3 times a week. Lenovo serviced/replaced it 3 times to no avail.

I have had never any sleep issues with my Macs.

And my wife's Macbook Air wakes itself up again if it tries to suspend when connected to a Dell monitor. Apple has plenty of bugs too, and only Apple can fix them.

> Every time I've used as a CAD GUI program I would get to this point where I would need to alter a single dimension by 0.25mm and realize that _all_ of my fastener holes, cutouts, etc have to be nudged with the keyboard or mouse to accommodate it.

There seems to be some fundamental misunderstanding of CAD here. I can't imagine how you could even design something in CAD in a way that you would end up in this situation.

I wonder if he's using TinkerCAD or something similar? I often use that, 'cos it's quick for simple things that are one-offs, but it has exactly this issue as it's not at all parametric, just primitives and booleans (though it does have some basic sketch capabilities now)

When I'm doing something more sophisticated I use SolveSpace, but I'm a lot slower with that.

yeah, op here: it's exactly that. I've used most of the free or open source software options and it seemed like none of them are parametric. I know I could buy fusion or something like that, but I found OpenSCAD before I got to that point and feel like it fits the bill for me.

Freecad is fully parametric, set constraints so it’s 0 degrees of freedom and you shouldn’t have that problem.

Fusion is free for personal use and in my experience at least was much faster experience than OpenSCAD.

You don't necessarily need to buy Fusion, it has a well hidden free tier for personal use, just gotta dig on the site a bit.

Sure, until the next time Autodesk decides to take a feature which you rely on out of the "free" tier.

I like Onshape. It’s free to use provided that you’re okay with your design being public.

FreeCAD is open source and has parametric capabilities. Personally I find it unusably buggy, but apparently there are lots who don't - ymmv.

SolveSpace is open source and has parametric capabilities. It's much more limited in scope (e.g. you can't do filets) but good enough for my purposes.

I've not explored the commercial options beyond TinkerCAD, and that's not parametric. Super easy to bodge something together though :)

Solvespace and Onshape are free and parametric.

>I can't imagine how you could even design something in CAD in a way that you would end up in this situation.

Are all CAD programs parametric or make their parametric functionality obvious? If not, that's how you end up in this situation.

It's not about parametric functionality being obvious, it's that you can't draw something that isn't parametric in the sense described. At least I don't think I would be able to if I tried.

It's pretty trivial

Almost like a, gasp, scroll bar? Who could have imagined those things might have some sort of purpose??

I'm grandfathered in at $200/year from the Safari days. The main advantage of the subscription to me is being able to evaluate several books on a topic to pick the one that is the best fit for what I need.

If I knew which books were best in category, it would be cheaper for me to just buy those specific books (or video courses, for things like Blender).

But if I had to pay the current $500 price, I wouldn't be a subscriber.

Agreed, I'm also on a $200/year plan and for me too the fact that I can skim multiple books on a single topic before settling on one is well worth the money.

Fanatical also has tech book bundles.

Alibre does not have a free option. They have a 30 day free trial and the low cost Atom3d package. I bought Atom3d and never use it because it's too painful. If I'm going to endure that much pain I might as well use FreeCAD which at least runs on Linux.

Seconded, OnShape is my favorite CAD package. I passed it over for a long time because I had poor expectations of a browser-based CAD. Just wish I could justify the commercial license.

I did this with Dungeon Crawler Carl, but now I finished all 7 and have to find something new.