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
Author Chuck Wendig posts about the many, many, things that “AI overviews” are making up about him and his family. According to Google he:
Way of the future.
Booked a few days of R&R time this week, to fly out to Iowa and attend the wedding of a friend (as much as one can befriend an Iowan). This week’s newsletter is named after an episode of the Twilight Zone and a They Might Be Giants song.
Speaking of Giants, somehow the San Francisco Baseball Giants are 1.5 games out of the Wild Card after what has been a… difficult season. Didn’t expect that. Let’s go Giants. Hopefully I’ll be able to waste some money at Oracle Park on the postseason again.
The continued enshittification of Google Search, once one of the most severely useful things ever invented by people, is really depressing. You can’t get correct answers anymore, and you can’t even get webpages made by people to show up on it without doing a bunch of weird tricks. You know this already.
Recently I am trying out Kagi again. It’s a search engine that actually shows you links to webpages containing the items you are searching for. An absolutely wild prospect, I know. One thing that sucks is that they too are all the way up Artificial Intelligence’s ass, but at least with Kagi you can kinda turn that shit off.
This is not a paid advertisement. I just hate what they’ve done to search.
Recent purchases include: A pair of decent Sony wired earbuds for when I am out and want to listen to things that sound good ($35). Next year’s notebook: A 2026 Hobonichi Techo Weeks w/ Mother 2 characters on the front. A whole bunch of Tijuana Toros baseball gear for the folks back home. The headphone link gets me a kickback if you buy one.
I’ve posted about this elsewhere, but RetroStrange has a little bespoke webpage that lets you see what items we have in the Catalog, meaning these are the videos that play randomly on RetroStrange TV. It’s pretty wild to look back at where we started and where we are. I just wanted to make an automated streamer for Old Time Radio episodes and had some spare time. Now we have that, a second radio channel with public domain music, and a 24/7 streaming TV channel.
The current RetroStrange TV Catalog stats:
Grand total: 657 files accounting for 441 hours 47 minutes 37 seconds. Yes, Curator Prime watched all of these at least once to clear them for inclusion. That’s a lotta watching. Join our Patreon so we can do more.
Over on OpenCV Live!, my weekly show about Computer Vision and AI, we’re off this week. That’s because I’m flying all over the damn place. We’re gonna be in Iowa for a wedding, in Illinois for friendship, and Michigan to visit the Nelson family over the next week. October in Michigan is not something to miss out on. I’m looking forward to it. We’re gonna eat some hot dogs and drink some beer and go for some walks and check out On Base Productions Studio B. If we have time, world domination. If we have time.
You can follow just my links with a feed, or on the website.
I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
See you down the road,
Phil Nelson
2025.09.15 +8UTC
Follow me around the innernette:
Google continues to manipulate entire industries at a whim, with no consequences:
The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding Proton Mail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because Proton Mail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.
They’ve got the right idea on how to “solve” the issue, but it’s a tall order:
This incident illustrates that for Proton Mail to be successful, it is important that we can continue to grow independently of search engines so that it is impossible for any search company to intentionally or unintentionally cripple us.
[A strong but honest headline about Googe’s new bullshit:][link]
>* Participation in the new service requires that your entire catalog be available for streaming, at high resolution.
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>* Participation requires that you not release your music elsewhere earlier, e.g., no early releases for fans or backers.
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>* You no longer get a choice of whether to do nothing, block a video, or run ads. Ads are mandatory.
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>* Five year contract.
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>* If you don’t participate in the new service, then the option to obtain Content-ID ad revenue from the free version of Youtube no longer exists.
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>* If you had previously been getting Content-ID ad revenue and choose not to participate in the new service, your channel will be deleted and all videos using your music will be blocked.
These are all non-negotiable and mandatory, btw.
[link]: http://boingboing.net/2015/01/26/google-strong-arms-indie-music.html “Google strong-arms indie musicians into accepting brutal, crowdfunding-killing deal for streaming service – Boing Boing”
Straight from the Apple’s mouth. It’s already in the Safari betas! This is great news. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my search provider for awhile now, and their new design is the bees knees.
Unlike some other search engines they aren’t in the business of selling your personal data.
[DuckDuckGo’s totally-overhauled site looks and feels great.][link] They replaced Google as my default search engine a year or so ago, and I haven’t regretted it for a second. [Here’s how to add them to Safari.][safari]
[link]: https://duck.co/blog/whatsnew “DuckDuckGo Reimagined & Redesigned”
[safari]: https://duck.co/help/desktop/safari “Adding DuckDuckGo to Safari”
[Marco sez:][link]
>Now, we’ll be forced to fill the hole that Reader will leave behind, and there’s no immediately obvious alternative. We’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.
>
>It may suck in the interim before great alternatives mature and become widely supported, but in the long run, trust me: this is excellent news.
I think he’s right. But it’s still going to be a major pain in the ass.
[link]: http://www.marco.org/2013/03/13/google-reader-sunset “Google Reader shutting down July 1 – Marco.org”
[This is good news for consumer and privacy advocates, and bad news for Google and Facebook.][link] The odds of either of these companies fully supporting Do Not Track are laughable, of course. This is how they make their money.
You can play with the dog all you like; just don’t grab its milkbone unless you want a fight.
[link]: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/ie10-do-not-track/ “In Ad Network Nightmare, Microsoft Making 'Do Not Track' Default for IE 10 | Threat Level | Wired.com”
[The beginning of a weekly must-read][link]. Andy is good people, a good writer, and sharp as a tack:
>On Wednesday, Google retired a longer-standing “plus”: the + operator, a standard bit of syntax used to force words and phrases to appear in search results. The operator was part of Google since its launch in 1997 and built into every search engine since.
The article is about how to get the + operator back.
[link]: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/10/google-kills-its-other-plus-and-how-to-bring-it-back/ “Google Kills Its Other Plus, and How to Bring It Back | Epicenter | Wired.com”
Narratively, that’s the story I find most interesting about Google. At a certain point, do you become so large and powerful that evil is unavoidable?
