Extra Future

Hi, I’m Phil Nelson, a writer, developer, and audio-visual maker of stuff. I have been making stuff online for over 25 years. I run RetroStrange and Set Side B. Good to see you.

Blog Archives

Category: Posts

  • Public Domain Day 2026 Around The Web

    Good news, everyone! It’s January 1st, and among other things, that means it’s Public Domain Day here in the United States of America. A bunch of great works from the past are now no longer under copyright, far fewer than should be if not for the interference in our legal system by massive copyright rent-seekers like Disney, but it’s still something. Here are some of the newly-free works that I think are worth your time, along with links to some more collected lists.

    • 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.

  • It’s a magical world, Hobbes ol’ buddy

    See you on the other side of 2025. Regular bloggery resumes January 5th.

  • The Indie Beat TV

    My friends at The Indie Beat, home to awesome fediverse-based music streaming channels, have launched their newest endeavor: The Indie Beat TV! It’s something like classic MTV, but independent, and therefore better by one thousand percent. I dropped into the chat yesterday for their big launch and it was a good group of folks cracking wise and enjoying some really great music and art. More coverage on NHAM

  • Making macOS Tahoe Suck Less Part I: Introduction, and Reduce Transparency

    We’re all pretty much in agreement: macOS 26 Tahoe is a god damn mess. There are people to blame but the fact remains that the macOS Interface is a hodgepodge of last years ideas, thawed and warmed over. Through years of half-aborted attempts at merging the interface styles of the mouse-based macOS, magic-based visionOS, and touch-based iPhone and iPad platforms, the mighty have been made low. Don’t even get me started on the usability and accessibility problems of the latest UI glaze, Liquid Glass. Apple was once the recognized leader in accessibility, and their Human Interface Guidelines was a sort of quasi-holy book to UX and UI designers for decades. Now I can’t tell which window is the active one without installing a fucking app.

    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.

  • Last-minute 3D Prints: Analogue Pocket Grip

    Threw this chubby little grip by Thingiverse user wilkesvaughn onto my Ender 3 Pro the day before a multi-leg trip thru the American Middle-West and so far it’s been nice. One thing that I’ll need to mod in: My travel earbuds have a 90-degree bend in the TRRS connector, which means I can’t use headphones with this on. It looks nice in pink on my black Pocket, with some light sanding right before hopping in a cab to the airport. I’ll clean the bottom a bit better when we get back. Take a look:

  • Client Work: Edge AI Earth Guardians Video

    I recently co-scripted and did the voiceover / narration for the latest competition from Hackster.io, Edge AI Earth Guardians. You can watch it on YouTube and listen to my voice if you’re into that:

    I encourage you to join the competition and make something cool!

  • Free Music: Pandemic of the Various

    I just uploaded the short album of electronic music I made in 2021, Pandemic of the Various, to this website for free download under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You can use it on your stuff!

    Listen & Download: Pandemic of the Various

    If you like my work, consider becoming a patron for just $1 per month.

  • RetroStrange Movie Night #56: We Salute The Star Man Movies (aka Super Giant)

    This post was originally shared on RetroStrange.

    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.

  • Where’s Phil? Summer 2025 Edition

    Photo of two men, with a table between them-- one is standing and flipping thru an old sci-fi paperback, the other is seated. They're having a conversation during a busy trade show.
    Phil @ Display Week 2025 wearing a Wild Fang jumpsuit. Go Team Venture.

    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.

  • Seeed Embodied AI Hackathon Video

    They dragged me down to Mountain View this weekend for the Seeed Embodied AI Hackathon. There were robot arms! Sadly nobody attached any knives to them. There were many Nvidia Jetsons won by contestants. Slightly jealous about that.

    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.