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.
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Humans May Be Able To Regrow Teeth Soon
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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.
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It’s a magical world, Hobbes ol’ buddy
See you on the other side of 2025. Regular bloggery resumes January 5th.
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delphitools – Handmade Developer Tools
A small set of privacy-first tools for makers, no logins, no bullshit. All run in the browser, no installation needed. Image converters, croppers, calculators (px to rem for example), QR code generator and more. Long live the handmade web.
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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
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The Secrets of the Sega Channel
The excellent Video Game History Foundation has just announced a new treasure trove of previously-inaccessible content from the short-lived Sega Channel including over 100 new Sega Channel ROMs.
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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.
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All In All We’re Just Like You – Phil’s Newsletter Vol. 4 Num. 8
It’s new notebook week! Hobonichi Techo Weeks, Mother 2 edition. Go big or go home. *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 +8UTCFollow 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
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Instacart Reportedly Using Secret AI-Powered Dynamic Pricing to Jack Up Prices
An independent investigation found that the same cart could be $10 more expensive based on vibes. As evacide mentioned on Mastodon, Instacart claims it is the stores fault, and the stores say Instacart sets the pricing. Such innovation! Way of the future.
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McDonald’s pulls AI Christmas ad after backlash
Laura Cress for BBC News:
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.
Posted in Links