Craig Butcher

Week Note Eighteen - May The Reference Be With You

The Mitchells vs the Machines

On the back of last week mayhem along with everything else happening including a much deserved bank holiday weekend, we kicked back and watched The Mitchells vs the Machines on Netflix. The result? We absolutely love it and could not stop laughing throughout. It definitely touched on a lot of issues of relying on the Wi-Fi, AI going to go berserk, and the classic family issues. Zany, colourful, and running in parallels with memes, YouTube, and pure weirdness. Love it!

Check out the trailer over at YouTube.

X11 Tools

Anyone who started out using *NIX in the past or even checking it out with the modern Linux distributions, do check out Cool, but obscure X11 tools. The first memory of looking at tools was the famous Cat Clock, GLXGears, XBill, and many more that randomly was loaded on screen. Come to think of it, the idea of using X11's default window system, twm, was crude yet speedy to use, although, CDE was easier to use. Thinking about accessibility, it was tricky having to learn various mouse uses because of left/middle/right clicks, mouse over, and focus stealing.

Focus stealing still exists today in macOS if you move the mouse over certain windows where you can scroll with the mouse wheel without having to switch to the app.

After all, does anyone still play NetHack?

Microsoft's xCloud beta

This is going to be the one to watch because the idea of streaming games has been around for a while with Geforce Now where you can play games that you have bought with Steam/Epic/GoG and use the service to play them on your phone, tablet, or desktop. Think of it as a virtual network gaming computer.

Microsoft has been working on xCloud for some time and the beta testing has begun recently. It looks set to be popular already with 100 console games ready to play.

The question is, will this idea finally become permanent because the idea of owning the latest XBox or PS console seems strangely unusual? This is one for futurology files.

And finally...

Python seems to be the thing to learn again in the web industry. Time to check that out and see what can be done!

Stay safe, summer is incoming. Unless you are in the United Kingdom...

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