Extra Future

Year: 2018

  • The Best Third-Party Carrying Case for the Bridge Mixed Reality Headset

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    by

    Phil Nelson
    in

    TL;DR: [This is the best case for Bridge](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M75B9XX/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&psc=1&linkCode=ll1&tag=phlnls-20&linkId=8045185ae65e6ff9c2456801cfed7b5c) — If you work on mixed reality games & experiences for the [Bridge headset](https://bridge.occipital.com/) like I do you might sometimes (ironically, for a super-portable headset like Bridge) have a bit of trouble with getting your headset from point A to point B. The box that Bridge comes…

  • CSS Sans

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    Phil Nelson
    in

    [A font constructed entirely by CSS](https://yusugomori.com/projects/css-sans/fonts). It is, essentially, a programmatic realtime typeface. I love how it degrades for older versions of IE: It’s not what I’d consider practical for production use. Still, CSS Sans is a hell of a demonstration of how far CSS has come since Microsoft shipped Internet Explorer 3 in 1996,…

  • Why Zuckerberg’s 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn’t Fixed Facebook

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    Phil Nelson
    in

    [Zeynep Tufekci with some strong medicine, for Wired](https://www.wired.com/story/why-zuckerberg-15-year-apology-tour-hasnt-fixed-facebook/): > In 2003, one year before Facebook was founded, a website called Facemash began nonconsensually scraping pictures of students at Harvard from the school’s intranet and asking users to rate their hotness. Obviously, it caused an outcry. The website’s developer quickly proffered an apology. “I hope you…

  • Crunch, an impressive new PNG compression tool for macOS

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    Phil Nelson
    in

    >[Crunch is a macOS tool](https://github.com/chrissimpkins/Crunch) for lossy PNG image file optimization. It combines selective bit depth, color type, and color palette reduction with zopfli DEFLATE compression algorithm encoding using embedded versions of the pngquant and zopflipng PNG optimization tools. The [example images](https://github.com/chrissimpkins/Crunch#examples) are impressive. Obviously, you won’t want to use this on your archival or…

  • S L O W G R A M

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    Phil Nelson
    in

    [Pay me $5 and I’ll print and mail you a copy of any picture you like on 4 x 6-inch glossy photo paper.][link] SLOWGRAM refuses to scale up or optimize. [link]: https://slowgram.extrafuture.com/ “SLOWGRAM”

  • A Selection of Machine-Generated NES Game Titles

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    Phil Nelson
    in

    I’ve begun learning how to do machine learning. It is extremely complicated, but I feel after just a few days of trying I understand it much better. [This python wrapper for tensorlm](https://github.com/batzner/tensorlm) has made generating results much easier for me. I’ve got my little machine trained on the full NES US release list, and it’s…

  • Vice Sports: The Forgotten Story of the First Black Female Wrestlers

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    Phil Nelson
    in

    [An excellent, necessary, article](https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/d3588k/the-forgotten-story-of-the-first-black-female-wrestlers): >Women’s wrestling was still riding high in the early 1950s and women across the country saw Burke, and no doubt her income, and wanted to follow suit—including a trio of sisters living in Columbus, Ohio. Babs Wingo was the first of the three to start training as a professional wrestler, followed…

  • GrayKey: The little box that unlocks iPhones

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    Phil Nelson
    in

    [Thomas Reed, for MalwareBytes][1]: >Two iPhones can be connected at one time, and are connected for about two minutes. After that, they are disconnected from the device, but are not yet cracked. Some time later, the phones will display a black screen with the passcode, among other information. The exact length of time varies, taking…

  • Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

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    Phil Nelson
    in

    [Zeynep Tufekc, for the New York Times:][link] >Mr. Grewal is right: This wasn’t a breach in the technical sense. It is something even more troubling: an all-too-natural consequence of Facebook’s business model, which involves having people go to the site for social interaction, only to be quietly subjected to an enormous level of surveillance. The…

  • Cambridge Analytica’s Ad Targeting Is the Reason Facebook Exists

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    Phil Nelson
    in

    >[Thousands of third party apps were designed solely to obtain and sell your data. It’s no surprise that the data ended up being used again on Facebook, one of the biggest advertising platforms on Earth.](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbxgzb/cambridge-analytica-facebook-ad-targeting-third-party-apps)

  • The Eleanor Rigby Battle Theme

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    Phil Nelson
    in

    [Single Link Twitter Post of the day](https://twitter.com/josefkenny/status/974587426676117505). A skillful mash-up of the classic Pokemon battle theme and the Beatles song Eleanor Rigby. Includes a video of the MIDI notes being played. (via [@joshmillard](https://twitter.com/joshmillard))

  • Facebook Quietly Hid Webpages Bragging of Ability to Influence Elections

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    Phil Nelson
    in

    [Sam Biddle for The Intercept][1]: >When Mark Zuckerberg was asked if Facebook had influenced the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, the founder and CEO dismissed the notion that the site even had such power as “crazy.” It was a disingenuous remark. Facebook’s website had an entire section devoted to touting the “success stories” of…