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

Month: May 2009

31 May 2009

Chrono Trigger Fan Game Crimson Echoes Leaked

[Apparently an alpha version][link], I’ve been waiting for this since Square Enix [cease-and-desisted the project][cease] a few weeks ago. Again, way to drop the ball, Square.

[link]: http://www.gossipgamers.com/chrono-fan-game-crimson-echoes-98-complete-leaked/ “Chrono Fan Game: Crimson Echoes 98% Complete Leaked | Gossip Gamers”
[cease]: http://extrafuture.com/2009/05/12/square-enix-shuts-down-chrono-fan-game-crimson-echoes/ “Square Enix shuts down Chrono fan game Crimson Echoes”
31 May 2009

Microsoft Update Quietly Installs Firefox Extension

[Installing addons to non-Microsoft software without meaningful notification][link]. Anyone who thinks the Zune HD or Windows 7 will be *better*, remember that this is where their instincts lie.

[link]: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/05/microsoft_update_quietly_insta.html?wprss=securityfix “Security Fix – Microsoft Update Quietly Installs Firefox Extension”
30 May 2009

How the Web and the Weblog have Changed Writing

[Philip Greenspun][link]:

>Our literary culture is impoverished when every idea is stretched or amputated to fit the Procrustean bed made up by magazine and book publishers. When an author runs out of relevant stuff to say after 20 or 30 pages, that’s how long the essay should be.

Quoting the same passage that [Gruber did][gruber], but fuck it. Bravo, Philip.

[link]: http://philip.greenspun.com/writing/changed-by-web-and-weblog “How the Web and the Weblog have changed Writing”
[gruber]: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/05/30/greenspun-weblog “Daring Fireball Linked List”
29 May 2009

Invaders! Possibly from Space!

[A video game][link] based on the “[Raiders of the Lost Arcade][leak]” segment of the Futurama episode “[Anthology of Interest 2][wikia]”.

[link]: http://www.shinobis-place.de/Page_neu/wip_projects.html “Shinobis-Place”
[leak]: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=535_1189897817 “Raiders of the Lost Arcade”
[wikia]: http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Anthology_of_Interest_II “Futurama Wiki: Raiders of the Lost Arcade”
29 May 2009

The Making of Zach Galifianakis

[New York Times piece on the rise of Galifianakis, his beard, and failures][link].

[link]: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/magazine/31Galifianakis-t.html “The Making of Zach Galifianakis – NYTimes.com”
28 May 2009

Restoration of the Hubbard Steam-Powered Motorcycle

[A steamcycle built in 1970 based on an article published in a 1918 issue of The Model Engineer and Electrician magazine][link]. According to this page, the author of the original article *never actually built the bike*. See also: [vid].

Dovetails nicely with [The Case for Working with Your Hands][hands], which is making the rounds today.

[link]: http://www.ctamachinery.com/SteamcycleHome.html “Diebold Agricultural Hall – CAMA”
[vid]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMbJy2MHeV4 “Hubbard Steamcycle Running at CAMA”
[hands]: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&hpw “NYTimes Magazine: The Case for Working With Your Hands”
28 May 2009

Mad Men Begins Production of Season 3

[Hallelujah][link].

[link]: http://blogs.amctv.com/mad-men/2009/05/season-3-production-starts.php “AMC – Blogs – Mad Men – Mad Men Begins Production of Season 3”
28 May 2009

Introducing Typekit

[A platform for css3’s @font-face][link]. The real test of this will be how many hoops you have to jump through to embed a font, and how it handles failure:

>We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.

The upside is that having a central place to access these fonts will be great for caching.

[link]: http://blog.typekit.com/2009/05/27/introducing-typekit/ “Introducing Typekit « The Typekit Blog”
27 May 2009

Closing Tabs 5/27/09
- Super Mario 64 longplay, grabbing all 120 stars. If you were under the age of 30 when this came out, goodbye afternoon. It’s such an astoundingly well put together game. At every stage, care was taken to make sure it “felt” right. Jason Scott‘s talk about Platform Studies has me rekindling my love affair with it.
- The Metroid Prime entry on Wikitroid. ’nuff said. Exploring the 3D transition of one of Nintendo’s other major franchises, which skipped the N64 and went straight to the GameCube. With Mario 64, everyone expected it to be mind-blowing. With Prime, everyone expected it to be shit. Sometimes everyone is wrong. Disclosure: I have stock options in Wikia.
- ANTHEM Platform. A platform for piping Social Networks, IM, email, OEMs, etc, to cell phone applications. Recently acquired by Good Technology.
- Imified. A service which runs IM bots for you, and acts as a go-between for you and the IM network. You can code up applications that the bot queries with what is said to it, by whom. They provide examples in PHP, which makes me happy.
- Google is “betting big on HTML5”. Speed of web development accelerating, canvas, video, client-side databases, web workers, etc. See also: YouTube using the HTML5 video tag.
- Sleeping with the NME: how the British music press picked up a dose of the crap, which is about the sorry state of the British music press. From Velvet Coalmine, which has become a favorite blog of mine.
- Remote-controlled sperm, or more precisely: remote-controller sperm-like nanodevices.
- CSS-only gradients using CSS3 and no images. Whatsoever. Uses the -webkit-gradient property. Hot shit.
27 May 2009

The Vendor Client Relationship

[This is how pretty much every major client I’ve ever had does things][link]. It is a lot less funny when you are waiting on thousands instead of dozens of dollars.

[link]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2a8TRSgzZY “YouTube – The Vendor Client relationship – in real world situations”