Where To Find Phil Nelson Online, September 2021 Edition

I’ve found things are easier when I post these periodic reminders of where I am doing stuff online these days, and how people can get at me or support me or both. A few changes from our previous edition in April 2021. Bold items are new. You can find a constantly updated version of of this on my About page. As of right now you can find me at the following online haunts:

Ongoing Projects

  • I co-host OpenCV’s Weekly webinar with Satya Mallick, live on Thursdays at 9am Pacific time. We just aired our 22nd episode.
  • RetroStrange Movie Night, a curated public domain movie night which now broadcasts live from the Niles Outdoor Dining Experience in downtown Niles, MI. There’s a Facebook group for event notifications and chit-chat.
  • RetroStrange TV, a 24/7 streaming public domain TV channel that shows old Movie Night movies and shorts curated by me and Noah Maher.
  • LOFI SCIFI on RetroStrange, the 24 hour streaming old time radio science fiction channel
  • Divergent League Baseball, my simulated fantasy baseball league – the new season is starting soon.

On Hiatus

  • My Itch account, where all of my (pay if you can / free) video games are hosted including the recently-released Chipping Challenge plus old experiments like Duck Jumper, Rassler, and Haunted Floating Eye. Game dev has stopped for awhile.

Phil’s Newsletter #39, Sticks & Fists Return

Now available on the Substack, issue 39 of my weekly newsletter. In it, I discuss the labors of the week: Marathoning season 1 of One Punch Man and both seasons of I Think You Should Leave.

Over , you can catch of Sticks & Fists, in which we take on Downtown Special: Kunio-Kun Downtown Special: Kunio-kun’s Historical Period Drama! which for the uninitiated westerners out there is sort of a sequel to River City Ransom. It owns and we’ll be playing it again this week, 7:30 pm Wednesday on Twitch.

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.

Finding and exploiting hidden features of Animal Crossing’s NES emulator

While looking for ways to activate the developer menus left over in Animal Crossing, including the NES emulator game selection menu, I found an interesting feature that exists in the original game that was always active, but never used by Nintendo. In addition to the NES/Famicom games that can be obtained in-game, it was possible to load new NES games from the memory card. I was also able to find a way to exploit this ROM loader to patch custom code and data into the game, allowing for code execution via the memory card.

Incredibly detailed and well-written article, goes super deep into reverse-engineering the technology.

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.

Universal Mega Dumper

Unnaturally tempted by this project, which has created a common platform for cartridge dumping w/ standard adapters for the major consoles. It auto-recognizes which type of cart you connect, too!

The Universal Mega Dumper (UMD) is a game catridge read/writer project designed around a Teensy++ microcontroller. The universality comes from the UMD’s ability to support many different types of catridge connectors by having general purpose 16 bit data and 24 bit address paths along with a dozen control signals – all of which can be customized for each game cartridge mode.

More on the project page.

Retrobatch, a new batch image processor from Flying Meat

Looks like a heck of a swiss-army-knife of a tool. It’s node-based, supports CoreML image classification and sorting, and yep… it supports AppleScript. FM’s suggestions for new use cases contain fun, weird, stuff like “Read an image from the clipboard, apply a drop shadow, and write it right back to the clipboard to paste into another app.”

Retrobatch is available as a 14 day free trial, and licenses start at $29.99. Props to Flying Meat for being one of those third-party Mac development houses that just keeps going.

CSS Sans

A font constructed entirely by CSS. 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, which was first browser to implement some of the CSS1 spec (CSS v1 was not yet a W3C recommendation).