Month: February 2025

Last time on Phil’s Newsletter: We tried sending from our own server. It didn’t go well.

Sweet Substack’s Baadasssss Song

Well, we are for better or worse now away from Substack. Last week’s newsletter was the first send with the new system and it went pretty badly! Turns out only about 30% of subscribers got that message. I went and signed up at SMTP2Go for a free plan (1k sends per month, more than enough for us) and modified some DNS records at Linode and hopefully this send actually reaches the intended destinations. So it goes. Please whitelist newsletter@extrafuture.com in your email clients.

This edition should also LOOK much better than the previous one, as I have spent some hours with the block editor and WordPress site editor this week to spiff-up my website at extrafuture.com. Lemme know if you get this, how it looks, and what you think in the comments.

The RetroStrange GIF Library

One of the things that Patrons support is the RetroStrange GIF Library. It’s a repository of 10 animated GIFs from each item in the RetroStrange TV catalog. That’s a ton of GIFs! No watermarks, use ’em for whatever you want. The GIF embedded here is from A Revolutionary Triumph in Tape (1958).

The code I use to generate the GIFs is open source on my GitHub. We like to give back, here at Phil’s Newsletter.

Won’t You Be My Patron?

Yes, I still have a Patreon. We’ve lost about 30% of our paying patrons over the last year or so. Currently we’re pulling down $58/mo, which pays for the hosting for RetroStrange and my other project Set Side B, an indie games blog. I’m still subsidizing the cost of RetroStrange TV out of my own pocket, so if you like that thing, please join for $1 per month so we can keep paying for it.

I feel like the Patreon drop has gone along with me not posting as much there, and not posting much in general. I’m starting to fix that by syndicating my newsletter over there starting with this one. Hello, Patrons.

This Week on OpenCV Live: Robot Race Cars

At my day job our guest on OpenCV Live episode 160 is Matt Flagg, a part of the world’s first professional autonomous motorsports team. That’s a fancy way of saying that they make and race robot cars which is pretty awesome. We stream at 9am Pacific time tomorrow.

Watch: Autonomous Motorsports with Computer Vision & AI (YouTube)

Phil’s Good Links

• 2024 was the worst year for journalists being murdered since the CPJ started counting. Israel was responsible for 70% of the known deaths.
• 1 teenager has been responsible for over 375 violent hoaxes, calling the SWAT team on innocent people. He was just sentenced to 48 months in prison.
• This Is the Age of the Coward. Disney, Target, and other mega-corps who were JUST recently pretending to be woke crumpled like wet paper for Trump’s horseshit.
• The Geniuses at DOGE Made Their Website so Insecure That Anyone Can Push Code To It
• Reddit’s CEO continues to promise to make the site worse for its users, this time by locking up content behind a pay wall. This is stuff the Reddit community wrote for free! Steve Huffman is a fucking dickhead.
• Two states are coming after a New York doctor for mailing abortion pills. The “States Rights” libertarian crowd is awful quiet all the sudden.
• One of gaming’s great visual artists died this week. RIP Viktor Antonov.
• Mark Zuckerberg has spent over 100 billion dollars on ‘The Metaverse’ and it still look like shit and nobody wants it. They removed the most recent marketing video because it got rightfully dunked on
• Like every American wannabe industrialist Elon Musk’s Texas Gigafactory was built with undocumented labor while he was publicly railing against immigrants.
• Open Source Software and Free Software is often a thankless job. So many mega-corps depend on OSS and give almost nothing back except headaches to the tiny teams of developers supporting massive user bases. Ask me how I know.
• Humane AI, the makers of that silly Star Trek pin that used AI to guess what you were looking at and cost $700, have shut down and the bones picked clean HP to the tune of $116m.
• “Even if you believe that Musk is trying to root out waste and fraud (and you really shouldn’t), he and his dweeby hatchet bros are only making things more corrupt and expensive.” Amen
• A few Israeli tourists to the US were shot because someone thought they were Palestinian. Hmmmm there’s a lesson here but nobody cares to learn it
• Those new NES games being made by Limited Run Games might explode your Nintendo due to a voltage mismatch. Tread lightly
• The homie (not that) Will Smith has a new newsletter, about how operating systems are bad now and also how to make them less bad. Go subscribe to Will

That’s all for today. Take care of yourselves out there.