- The works of P.G. Wodehouse, one of the funniest and sharpest writers I’ve ever read. His Jeeves series is just tremendous. Yes, this is where calling all butlers “Jeeves” comes from in popular culture.
- The works of jazz composer, saxophonist, and bandleader Charlie Parker.
- The work of Hannah Arendt, an incredibly important writer on history and philosophy. Her most known work is probably The Origins of Totalitarianism which is still as vital today as it was when she wrote it post-World War II. Perhaps moreso.
- The Sam Spade detective story The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.
- The Skeleton Dance, the first Silly Symphonies short made by Ub Iwerks for Walt Disney.
- Blackmail, the first sound film by Alfred Hitchcock
- Singin’ in the Rain, the seminal musical
- Rhapsody in blue by George Gershwin
As of right now all of these works are now free to use, distribute, and display in public free of charge in the US! You can find a bunch more to dig through at Public Domain Review, Everybody’s Libraries, and the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University.
As always, the absolutely essential Internet Archive is the best place to find copies of all these things in various formats for streaming, reading, downloading, etc.
"Public Domain Day 2026 Around The Web" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
]]>"It’s a magical world, Hobbes ol’ buddy" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
]]>"The Indie Beat TV" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
]]>Tahoe 26.1 was released with options introduced to mitigate some of these UI bombs. macOS is still kinda shitty now. In this series I’m going to help you make the Mac better to use overall. These will be geared toward the normie audience, who maybe aren’t super familiar with the command line, so keep that in mind with your inevitable criticisms.
(An aside — In their official docs, Apple refers to the menu bar always in lowercase, because it’s just a menu bar. The ‘desktop’ is the same way. This is interesting, because we live in an era where everything is a branded product whose name is a proper noun– see the Dock– and we are not allowed to merely use things, we are forced to experience using them and you legally can’t ‘experience’ a regular ‘ol noun. Everybody knows it’s gotta be a proper noun in order to be experienced. The Las Vegas Demon Orb Experience. The Microsoft Windows Desktop Experience. The ESPN Experience Brought To You By Sports Gambling. The 6th Street Hostel Bathroom Experience. But our friends “menu bar” and “desktop” are just two things, average, normal, unobtrusive. This says something about how the people who created these things thought about them.)
Anyway macOS kinda sucks now and there isn’t much we can do about it, but we can do more than nothing. So let’s do some more-than-nothing to it to make it suck a little less.
Fixing The macOS menu bar, Dock, and Control Center readability with “Reduce Transparency”
Best I can figure, the head designers of macOS Tahoe absolutely hate the menu bar and Dock. These are two of the main things people use when they use macOS, and macOS kinda sucks to use now, so this makes sense. The good news is that there is a quick way to make it so you can actually read the menu bar again, with a visit to the Accessibility settings.
The trick to getting your menu bar readability back, and a lot of other much-easier-to-read fixes around macOS, is to hit up the Settings app, then click Display, then toggle the ‘Reduce transparency’ setting to the on position. That is it. It looks like this:
Maybe I’ll do more of these maybe not. Ok that’s all for now bye.
"Making macOS Tahoe Suck Less Part I: Introduction, and Reduce Transparency" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
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"Last-minute 3D Prints: Analogue Pocket Grip" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
]]>I encourage you to join the competition and make something cool!
"Client Work: Edge AI Earth Guardians Video" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
]]>Listen & Download: Pandemic of the Various
If you like my work, consider becoming a patron for just $1 per month.
"Free Music: Pandemic of the Various" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
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Movie Night returns this July 25th as part of the Radio Free Fedi Fest with a super marathon of our favorite tokusatsu hero, Star Man. Join us July 25th starting at 2000 UTC (that’s 1pm Pacific time) and running through the entire Star Man English dub catalog:
- Atomic Rulers of the World
- Invaders from Space
- Attack From Space
- The Evil Brain From Outer Space
RETRO STRANGE MOVIE NIGHT is a live online and sometimes On Location streaming movie night. We stream a curated bath of public domain movies, cartoons, and shorts on our free 24/7 streaming channel RetroStrange TV and open up a (totally optional) group audio/video chat in Discord (join link). It’s fun. You’re invited.
We’ll see you there, live on RetroStrange TV.
"RetroStrange Movie Night #56: We Salute The Star Man Movies (aka Super Giant)" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
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We got a lot going on this month. Here’s a field survey of Where I’m At:
Last week (May 12-16): Successfully booked and hosted the day-long OpenCV-SID Conference on Computer Vision and AI, then 3 days of working the OpenCV Pavilion booth I designed at the Display Week 2025 conference in San Jose. Talked to about 200 people and ate 3 Marriott Hotel salads.
Next week (May 20-23): Working the OpenCV booth at Embedded Vision Summit in Santa Clara. We’re booth #704 on the show floor.
May 29: Hosting a Hackster Impact Spotlight event on Industrial Automation. Watch on LinkedIn Live.
June 10-16: Headed to Nashville for Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference, another long week at the booth slinging stickers and buttons with my people.
June 25-July 1: Trip to Ciudad de México con mi novia.
Now accepting food and drink recommendations for CDMX & Nashville.
As for my social medias, I’m available at the usual places:
- I’m on Patreon, please support my work if you can. Even a new $1/month backer makes a big difference to me financially (and mentally tbh). Thanks.
- On my YouTube (@philnelson) and TikTok (@extrafuture) channels I post a video every morning of me stamping today’s date on paper.
- I’m on the xoxo.zone Mastodon server (@philnelson) and I’m philnelson on Bluesky, posting fairly regular on both.
- RetroStrange is still going on! We average about 7-10 viewers at a time on our totally free 24/7 streaming channel RetroStrange TV. It’s on Roku too.
- Our little indie gaming blog Set Side B remains one of the last good blogs. John is doing a great job over there. Send us your pitches, but we’re too broke to pay.
- OpenCV Weekly Webinar has some real good stuff coming up. We’re going to be changing up some things in production to improve video and audio quality.
That’s about it for now. Stay frosty. It’s hot out there.
"Where’s Phil? Summer 2025 Edition" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
]]>I chatted with the winners and organizers and made a little video about it as part of my work with OpenCV, video embedded below.
It is HELLA out of focus. Steps have been taken to remedy this for next time.
"Seeed Embodied AI Hackathon Video" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
]]>I turned 42-years-old last Saturday. The answer to live, the universe, and everything is now mine. Turns out it really is as simple as ”be kind.”
I ain’t too proud to post my Amazon wishlist and hope a couple of you are feeling generous. We’re skint here are the Wizard Tower lately.
Weird Al has the best birthday song, and it’s not even close. The lyrics are upsettingly relevant again despite it being damn near as old as I am. What are your faves? Difficulty level: Not the Beatles one.
Distant Early Warning
I’m still working on moving this newsletter off of Substack to my own WordPress site, which I’ve been running for 10+ years on extrafuture.com. The reasons for this are myriad, but here’s a short list: Substack is at best ambivalent towards nazis, bigots, and other shitheads of their ilk, they’re an a16z portfolio company (these things are related), they take 10% of any subscriber payments I get, they demand exclusivity of subscriptions, the list goes on. When I started this I chose Substack because I saw others having success there, the UI was simple, and I needed to do _something_ or go stark raving mad.
The immediate danger has passed. Let’s take this ad-hoc infrastructure and replace it with something better. I will send more details on this when I finally flip the switch. You shouldn’t notice much difference, except for one thing: You will get this newsletter from a different email address.
The Weather
Over on my YouTube channel @philnelson I’ve been taking over for the late David Lynch and providing morning weather reports along with musical remembrances. Today we’re listening to Kendrick. Congrats.
Phil’s Good Links
Told ya they’d be back.
- Panic bought the most adorable vintage radio for their kitchen, with a neat little physical interface
- The Video Game History Foundation dropped an incredible new resource, the VGHF Library, full of fascinating artifacts like old game magazines and promotional material.
- Microsoft, OpenAI and the usual gang are flipping their shit because a Chinese startup has released a new open source “reasoning” language model that is roughly as good as the ones they spent $200 billion to train for under $10 million.
- For no reason, the ACLU’s guide for what to do if police or ICE agents stop you. Furthermore, ICE must be disbanded.
- Friend of the Newsletter and musician “Brad Sucks” has a new album out called “Naturally.” Give it a listen, give it a buy
- “Introduction to a Self Managed Life” is a 13-hour presentation covering the soup-to-nuts pipeline for hosting your own internet infrastructure, going in to pretty deep detail on each step. I fucking love it.
—
Thanks for reading,
Phil Nelson
Wizard Tower, SoMA, Earth
2025.01.31 +8UTC
Follow me around:
- My website, Extra Future
- BlueSky @philneslon
- I’m @[email protected] on Mastodon
- YouTube @philnelson too
- Twitch @extrafuture
"Phil’s Newsletter – Happy Happy Happy Birthday" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
]]>Hey there. How’s it going? What are you looking forward to this year? I mean it, click over and post in the comments when you read this. I wanna see something.
Checking In
Some housekeeping to start: I’m trying to move this newsletter off of Substack for various reasons, primarily that many of the people they platform are harmful shitheads. Here’s a reminder: You don’t have to take everyone’s money.
As a result I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at other software like Ghost, and the WordPress Newsletter plugin. One of the big goals for 2025 in my wizard tower is to self-host as much as I can, and get off the big platforms as much as I can. Currently this means I’m using Debian a lot more than I used to. This is overall a good thing.
I’ll give you some notice before we change, but believe me when I say it is in the works.
Work Work Work
Things are going pretty well at OpenCV. Our YouTube channel @OpenCVOfficial just passed 100,000 subscribers and 150 episodes and I get a fancy award to hang on my wall. You bet your ass I had them put my name on it. Photo shoot coming soon. We recently also just launched a new competition. This one involves robot arms and as such is awesome. I made a little trailer to introduce the concept and the prizes:
I’m working on a DIY “cyberdeck” using a low-cost, low-power single-board computer as a side project lately. I’m going to use Armbian, it’s a work in progress with a custom 3D printable case. Photos soon, promise.
Phil Nelson’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
RetroStrange
RetroStrange has quietly expanded a bit— In addition to RetroStrange TV we now have a 24/7 Halloween Channel, taking over from the not very popular RetroStrange Select. It plays Halloween-y stuff all day every day.
We also now have RetroStrange Radio2, a 24/7 audio stream which plays the (now public domain) hits of the 1920s.
Our next RetroStrange Movie Night is on my birthday, February 1st! If you want to buy me something, here’s my Amazon wishlist.
Phil’s Good Links return next week…
Thanks for reading,
Phil Nelson
Wizard Tower, SoMA, Earth
2025.01.15 +8UTC
Follow me around:
- My website, Extra Future
- BlueSky @philneslon
- I’m @[email protected] on Mastodon
- YouTube @philnelson too
- Twitch @extrafuture
Phil Nelson’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
"Phil’s Newsletter: “Twenty Twenty Fuck”" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
]]>Read: Celebrating the Life of Aaron Swartz: Aaron Swartz Day 2024 on EFF
"Celebrating the Life of Aaron Swartz: Aaron Swartz Day 2024" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
]]>San Francisco police have been using drones to catch car break-in suspects and investigate sideshows for months but internal emails show they knowingly broke the law by buying the crime-fighting tech.
Now the San Francisco Police Department is asking city leaders to approve the drones after it ignored warnings from within its ranks that it should have held off. Newly unearthed SFPD emails show the first call for caution came months ago from one of its own policy experts.
If it isn’t intentionally slowing traffic enforcement or illegally sweeping encampments it’s something else. Your tax dollars at work, folks.
"San Francisco Police Dept. Caught Buying Illegal Drones" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
]]>- I am @philnelson on the XOXO.zone Mastodon server and @philnelson.bsky.social on Bluesky.
- I co-host OpenCV Live with Satya Mallick, almost every Thursday at 9am Pacific time
- I have a Patreon, where you can support me (and RetroStrange, and SetSideB) directly each month and get exclusive content and early access to stuff
- My Twitch (@extrafuture) and YouTube (@philnelson) channels where I sometimes stream video games, and we do RetroStrange Movie Night on every other Saturday night
- I’m philnelson#1094 on Discord, and we have our own Extra Future & RetroStrange server you can join.
- Extra Future, this place here, my blog since 2008 or so, where I announce and release things
- My Thingiverse and Hackster accounts, where I post my 3D printable model designs.
- My LinkedIn where I mostly follow and post about computer vision / artificial intelligence projects.
Ongoing Projects
- RetroStrange TV, a 24/7 streaming public domain TV channel that shows old Movie Night movies and shorts curated by me and Noah Maher.
- Set Side B, the indie gaming blog from the flipside. We cover things from an independent lens, and focus on deeper coverage of more niche games and genres.
- RetroStrange Halloween Channel, our second 24/7 streaming channel, showing only the spookiest stuff from our main catalog.
- RetroStrange Movie Night, a curated public domain movie night that runs every two weeks. There’s a Facebook group, too.
- Radio1 aka LOFI SCIFI on RetroStrange, the 24 hour streaming old time radio science fiction channel
On Hiatus
- My newsletter on Substack has been on a long pause. I will get back to this soon, when I have time to move us off of Substack because they are cool with outright nazis on their platform and that is bad.
- Divergent League Baseball, my simulated fantasy baseball league – just finished our 1999 season. You can see many of the games on the Divergent League YouTube.
- My Itch account, where all of my (pay if you can / free) video games are hosted including the recently-released Chipping Challenge plus old experiments like Duck Jumper, Rassler, and Haunted Floating Eye. Has been awhile since I made a game.
"Where to Find Phil Online, September 2024 Edition" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
]]>No watermarks, no bullshit. Feel free to use these for any purpose.
Visit: The RetroStrange GIF Gallery
"The RetroStrange GIF Gallery" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
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]]>
Phil will talk about the one true sport, Pro Wrestling. Also: City builder / strategy game Manor Lords hit Steam Early Access in April, and it’s pretty interesting. In this episode Phil will start a new game and we’ll make the beginnings of a thriving medieval land together. Plus, maybe: Vampire Survivors co-op!
Watch along:
"Phil’s Show ep4: Pro Wrestling, and Let’s Play Manor Lords –" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
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“Phil’s Show.” is a live-stream variety show hosted by me, Phil Nelson, Tuesdays at 7pm Pacific time. I play video games, interact with the audience, and invite friends and guests from my 20+ career in computer vision, AI, design, and web development.
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@philnelson
Watch on Twitch: https://twitch.tv/extrafuture
"Watch my new show, Phil’s Show., Tuesdays at 7pm" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
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This year’s RetroStrange Halloween track is now available on Bandcamp. It’s called “Forest Quest” and it was created by Nicky Flowers, thanks to the support of my Patrons.
You can download it free, right now!
"Forest Quest" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.
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