"Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.

"Setting up an IRC server" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.

"Build Your Own Breadboard NES" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.

Here’s a good look at some of the top alternatives, ranked by Functionality, Openness, Security, Safety, & Decentralization.

"Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.

Ring is rolling back many of the reforms it’s made in the last few years by easing police access to footage from millions of homes in the United States. This is a grave threat to civil liberties in the United States. After all, police have used Ring footage to spy on protestors, and obtained footage without a warrant or consent of the user. It is easy to imagine that law enforcement officials will use their renewed access to Ring information to find people who have had abortions or track down people for immigration enforcement. 

Don’t use Ring. Don’t let your friends use Ring.

"Amazon Ring Cashes in on Techno-Authoritarianism and Mass Surveillance" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.

The French offices of Elon Musk’s X have been raided by the Paris prosecutor’s cyber-crime unit, as part of an investigation into suspected offences including unlawful data extraction and complicity in the possession of child pornography.

No additional comment necessary, but… why is X still available on the App Store? Apple is deliberately allowing a CSAM app to be downloaded. Their credibility is shot.

"X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.

"Coconaut Hotel" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.

"Icons in Menus Everywhere — Send Help" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.

"Why Isn’t Online Age Verification Just Like Showing Your ID In Person?" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.

"Humans May Be Able To Regrow Teeth Soon" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.

• 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.

"delphitools – Handmade Developer Tools" 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.

"The Secrets of the Sega Channel" 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.

*coughing, dusting self off* Boy it sure has been a *checks notes* *checks watch* jesus, only 3 months? I guess that tracks.

I’m still a-bloggin’ away over on Extra Future, a website that still exists and that I post things to. Based on a quick bit of math in my head I have basically been writing blogs for like 30 years? Messed up, if true. On this version of my outboard brain the posts go back to 2007. But, what of it? No matter. Go on singing.

We’re gonna lead off this newsletter with some of them thar links and light commentary, then maybe if you’re good I’ll talk a little about infrastructure work and the holiday schedule of my streaming channel RetroStrange TV and how things are going in my non-profit work.

Some Recent Links From My Blog

• DOCTYPE Magazine – an honest-to-goodness 80s-style coder mag for HTML, with code snippets you type in. $10. Get in.
• Marion County agrees to pay out $3M for newspaper raid – Back in 2023 the entire police department raided the only newspaper, for the crime of publishing things the police didn’t like. Good to see some comeuppance.
• Instacart Reportedly Using Secret AI-Powered Dynamic Pricing to Jack Up Prices – Dynamic Pricing, the most visible “innovation” from commerce in the last 5-10 years, is a god damn nightmare. This is what they’re using “AI” for, now.
• You Are Not Immune To Shopaganda – On Influencers and The Influenced.

RetroStrange TV Holiday Content Mode

Over on RSTV our Christmas Etc stuff starts December 15th, when we will change the channel over to nothing but Xmas stuff, which (according to The Catalog) includes new-to-the-channel videos like Tales from Dickens- A Christmas Carol (1959), The Twelve Days of Christmas (1963) and The Christmas Deer- A Legend Retold (1958). See the full list on the RetroStrange blog post.

Importantly it is also the 5th year for our 24 Hours of The Doughnuts marathon, where we play nothing but The Doughnuts (1963) over and over again from Festivus Eve through Festivus Day. We hope you’ll join us.

We also made some improvements to the RetroStrange GIF Gallery, a site which hosts over 4,500 free GIFs from stuff in our catalog, like A Colour Box (1935) and Carnival of Souls (1962). These are watermark-free, high-quality, farm-to-table GIFs. 455 media items, 10 GIFs each, free to you from us.

As always, RetroStrange is viewer-supported and ad-free, but it costs real money every month to run our websites for you. Join the Patreon if you can help us out a little on the regular, or you can do a one-time tip if that’s more your vibe. No pressure. You can follow RetroStrange on Mastodon and Bluesky.

OpenCV Live World Domination Continues

The weekly show on AI and Computer Vision that I host with Dr. Satya Mallick, OpenCV Live!, now has over 155,000 subscribers on YouTube and we have had a couple of recent vids breach containment and rack up over 100,000 views each. Our views per episode have been slowly creeping up and then went ka-bam (in a good way) in October. Episode 200 is on the horizon.

On this week’s episode (#194) our guest is Joseph Nelson from Roboflow (no relation) who showed us the new tool Roboflow Rapid, which enables the creation of custom vision-based machine learning models in just a few minutes. It’s pretty rad stuff.

Parting Shot

Do you work on a computer primarily? Do you ever change the settings of the operating system to make it more yours? What do you do? On iPhone I bump up the font size, enable button shapes, and turn down transparency. On macOS I make the menubar opaque. What about you?

This post is also an edition of my email newsletter, which is free and I host independently on my own infrastructure away from Substack and X and all that. If you haven’t yet, pretty please subscribe to my free newsletter. I like it when the number goes up. Just let me have this.

See you down the road,
Phil Nelson
2025.12.13 +8UTC

Follow me around the innernette:

• My website, Extra Future
• My Patreon, which I encourage you to join for just $1/mo pretty please thank you
• On BlueSky @philnelson
• I’m @philnelson@xoxo.zone on Mastodon
• YouTube @philnelson, where I post daily stamps
• Twitch @extrafuture
• LinkedIn, I guess

"All In All We’re Just Like You – Phil’s Newsletter Vol. 4 Num. 8" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.

"Instacart Reportedly Using Secret AI-Powered Dynamic Pricing to Jack Up Prices" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.

The 45-second advert was produced with generative AI clips and released publicly on McDonald’s Netherlands YouTube channel on 6 December.

Viewers on social media denounced the use of AI in the film, with one commenter calling it “the most god-awful ad I’ve seen this year”.

Way of the future.

"McDonald’s pulls AI Christmas ad after backlash" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.

Step into the shoes of a powerful VC who’s totally not having ANY doubts at all about their gigantic investment in generative AI.

Funny stuff. Source: Aftermath

"“You Have Billions Invested In Generative AI”" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. Comments are enabled. Come say hi.