Microsoft Solitaire and more – This Geek in Review for 29 May 2020

I had a discussion with my mother once about wanting to play Freecell but she didn’t have access to a computer. “You know, you can play Freecell with a deck of cards…” She was not amused. What is amusing is how popular Microsoft Solitaire is as it turns 30 years old. Solitaire has 35 million monthly players which is 3 times the number of people playing World of Warcraft. In other Microsoft news, GW BASIC is now open source. BASIC started Microsoft, so this is a bit of interesting history.

Has Zoom video conferencing gotten bland? What about some new locations for your virtual meetings? Meet the company that is holding meetings in Red Dead Redemption 2. There are a few downsides, but it sounds awesome.

Turn on your 60s era mainframe with Alexa

Some people may be afraid of Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially after Nvidia’s AI generated a Pac-man clone after watching 50,000 hours of Pac-Man, but I don’t see too much to get worked up about. Just like that annoying kid in school who copied your answers for the test, Nvidia’s AI created nothing new, it just copied.

I’m one of the first people to hop on the Zack Snyder sucks bandwagon after the travesty of Batman Vs. Superman. Seriously, the movie was so boring that I heard a guy snoring during the big battle scene at the end. But, after watching the extended version of BvS, parts of the movie now made sense. This elevated the movie almost to the level of mediocrity.

Because of personal issues, Joss Whedon came in to finish the Justice League movie, adding some much-needed humor. Since then, fans have been clamoring for the ‘Snyder Cut’ of Justice League, and it is now happening on HBO Max. I hardly remember watching Justice League the first time, so my second viewing will seem like the first time all over again.

One of the first things I did when we signed up for Disney+ was to check out The Simpsons. I was hoping Disney wouldn’t fail like FX, but I was too hopeful and it crushed my dreams. The Simpsons on Disney+ were the cropped versions, which means several site gags were lost. Fortunately, Disney has seen the light, and will be releasing The Simpsons in their original aspect ratio on May 28th. Now if we can get the video distributors to stop cropping popular TV shows that were released pre-HD. Friends and Seinfeld look terrible with the framing of the shots being off.

DEVO’s “Mongoloid” about the arcade game Asteroids