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

Tag: web development

  • 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.

  • 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

    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:

  • DOCTYPE Magazine

    An honest-to-goodness 80s-style coder mag with HTML web apps you type out and run locally. It’s $10. Go forth and code.

  • “Infrastructure Time” – Phil’s Newsletter Vol. 4 No. 4

    I think last time we talked I was gearing up for the busy conference time, and we’ve finally splatted out on the other side of that after stopping in Nashville and San Jose, but somehow it’s still the busy season over here in my Wizard Tower floating high above fragrant SoMA in San Francisco.

    One of my guitars, Vincent, getting some work done on the bench.

    I write these newsletters sometimes just so I remember what even happened. This is one of those. Let’s see what has been cooking over here.

    Infrastructure Week(s)

    Had a hell of a good time decommissioning several of the servers that run RetroStrange, Set Side B, Extra Future, etc, with Linode (our longtime website host) and consolidating them into one bigger, better, server. Now everything is faster, running newer software, and our hosting bill is about half what it was. We’ve got all the above websites, RetroStrange Radio 1, Radio 2, and my newsletter, on one 4gb Linode virtual server, with another 4gb server broadcasting RetroStrange TV. All running Debian and Ubuntu.

    Linode is still a pretty good web host, despite their recent price increases. Sign up for an account with my referral link and I get a small kickback.

    We also took down the RetroStrange Halloween Channel, which we launched last year as a way to keep the Hween spirit going all year. Nobody really watched it, so we had to take it down to save money. We’re still going to turn the RSTV main feed into all spooky stuff for Halloween, don’t you worry.

    I also took the opportunity to swap out the old RetroStrange TV uplink server, a little mini PC that lives in my apartment and sends the RSTV video feed up to the broadcast server, to a Beelink Mini S12 Pro. It runs Ubuntu, and we use OBS to send the 24/7 feed. We’re now Open Source Software from top to bottom over here, and the stream looks and sounds better than ever at the same bitrate. Go watch, you’ll see what I mean. I spent a couple more bucks on a new 8-port ethernet switch to keep everything here locally running smoothly.

    A little more Inside Baseball before I stop rambling about our indie web infra: RetroStrange TV now averages 5-15 viewers at a time, which is pretty great to see. It costs about $40/mo to run the servers.

    We could really use your support on Patreon. It’s a buck a month, and it keeps the lights on.

    The Work, It Continues

    Recently I lent my narration to a new wildlife conservation-focused competition, Edge AI Earth Guardians. I like how it turned out:

    I’m trying to book more script writing and voiceover gigs. Holler at ya boy. I’m working on a couple of short 30s-1m spots with some other customers right now which I’ll update you on next time. You can see some of my past & present work in video production on my site.

    My day job, running all of the public-facing and much of the back office stuff for OpenCV, the world’s largest computer vision library, is still happening. It is happening so much.

    Our YouTube channel now has over 120,000 subscribers which is kinda wild. Our Thursday morning live stream, OpenCV Live!, attracts somewhere between 150-200 peak live viewers every week. We’re finally popular enough that people are swiping whole episodes and uploading them to their own channels. Talk about a milestone. Over on LinkedIn I’ve built us up to 325,000 followers. Our newsletter subscriber count just passed 370,000. Things are happening, and yet…

    Overall, it’s been a tough year for Non-Profit Organizations like OpenCV especially in tech. With the Trump Tariffs and the seemingly-random removal of tons of National Science Foundation grants, we are in a more precarious position than ever. If your company uses Computer Vision, consider donating to OpenCV or even better, becoming a supporting member organization. Sharing the link helps us a lot, too.

    Moosick

    I released Pandemic of the Various, the music album of short electronic weirdness I made in 2021, under a Creative Commons license and put it up for free download on my website. Go check it out. Yes, you can use it for stuff without asking.

    The Good Links

    Enough of my bullshit for now. Here are some Good Links.

    That’s all for now. In the next month I’m headed to Tijuana, Iowa (congrats Joseph and Katie), Chicago and good ‘ol Niles. See you on the road.

    Phil Nelson
    Wizard Tower, SoMA, Earth
    2025.08.25 +8UTC

    Follow me around:

  • How To Add Swap Space on Debian 11

    Spent this lazy Saturday morning working on the EXFU002 web server, which hosts this very website. People ask me sometimes for advice on setting up servers, and aside from the standard security stuff (SSH on nonstandard port, fail2ban, no root login, key-based logins only…) I’ll be adding the info from guide from DigitalOcean. The guide is great at explaining some stuff about swap files, swappiness, and cache pressure that I did not know despite my decades of experience here. Mabye you’ll learn something, too.

    Read: How To Add Swap Space on Debian 11 (Digital Ocean)

  • How to Monetize a Blog

    This is an incredible webpage. Art project, blog post, expose, a shout into the void all at once.

  • The RetroStrange GIF Gallery

    Over on RetroStrange, we’ve launched a new project for the community: The GIF Gallery. When we add media to the RetroStrange catalog, we also run a script that generates 7 GIFs from the media in question, then another script creates individual HTML pages for each item in the catalog. We’re excited to share it with you!

    No watermarks, no bullshit. Feel free to use these for any purpose.

    Visit: The RetroStrange GIF Gallery

  • Introducing StrangeLine and More RetroStrange-ness

    This weekend I did some work on RetroStrange infrastructure and scheduling.

    RetroStrange TV (our 24/7 streaming TV channel) which is now fully autonomous and publishes notifications to Twitter when each show or movie begins with the #RSTV hashtag. You can find my TV station code on GitHub. The current setup of two Linode 4GB servers this should provide us with enough space and power to run it basically forever at $40/month. Support via Patreon appreciated.

    The next RetroStrange Movie Night is November 23rd and we’re showing film noir classic D.O.A. (1949) see the Facebook Event.

    The other big RetroStrange feature is the StrangeLine. I’ve set up a phone number you can call for various RetroStrange stuff. Right now you can call to get info on the next Movie Night, or listen to the Skulking Permit by Robert Sheckley as heard on LOFI SCIFI. We’ll add and change up the content regularly, so go ahead and give ‭(814) 787-2643‬ (that’s 814-STRANGE) a call.

  • A Deep Dive on Z-Index Usage

    How do you make sure your annoying popup is shown on top of every other element in the page, when you don’t know how many there are, who wrote them, and how bad they wanted their elements to be on top? That’s when you set your z-index to 100, or maybe 999, or maybe, just maybe 99999 to be really sure yours will win.

    That, at least, is how I write my CSS. In the rest of this post, we will look at millions of z indices to see what everyone else does.

    Of course, if you make websites for a living you’ll find this interesting. Like most things available here.

  • Rough.js – A “Hand-drawn” Javascript Vector Library

    Neat tool for drawing cutesy vector shapes:

    Rough.js is a light weight (~9kB gzipped) graphics library that lets you draw in a sketchy, hand-drawn-like, style. The library defines primitives to draw lines, curves, arcs, polygons, circles, and ellipses. It also supports drawing SVG paths.

    There’s a lot of nuance to this, too. For example, there are 5 distinct fill styles (hachure, solid, zigzag, cross-hatch, or dots) and it supports Web Workers with the optional Workly library.