Hi Quinten,

An app I made to force myself to use my phone less. I took some embarrassing photos of myself and gave the app permission to blackmail me into putting my phone down.

Rory Sutherland called it genius. The App Store reviewers’ verdict was “rejected”.

A few years ago I uploaded a spoken-word track about tree planting to Spotify. The idea was that the money it generated in royalties would go to planting trees. People could add it to playlists to offset their listening.

4.2 million streams later, it’s been featured in media all over the world and has a dedicated pool of listeners.

42,000 trees planted · 4.2M+ streams · 6 languages

Planted in Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique and Haiti

mptr.ee · Listen on Spotify

I was haunted by what I read about forced labour in South Asian brick kilns. Volunteers have spent years searching satellite photographs for the telltale shapes of kilns. Those locations can help NGOs decide where to investigate.

I tried automating the first pass with vision models. I’m cleaning it up to share with a charity. Similar tools could help find illegal logging, polluted rivers and all sorts of other problems. The underlying technology is becoming cheap and widely accessible.

I was watching YouTube with my nephew when an advert for a toy came on.

The instant it finished he wanted one.

My brother asked, “Why can’t we make ads for broccoli like that?”

So I made a Chrome extension that replaces YouTube ads with videos I made for myself.

They encourage me to go to bed earlier, stop doomscrolling and eat broccoli.

I actually love the medium of advertising.

The imagery and copywriting.

Condensing a complex idea into its purest form.

So I made a social ad blocker.

It swaps ads for things your friends and family made. People can upload photos, drawings or AI-made ads, which then appear around the web for their friends.

I like the thought of seeing an advert for a friend’s games night this Friday, a new dog announcement, or something silly in the middle of a news website or Twitter.

Shush is an iPhone app that selectively mutes annoying people.

It uses AI to recognise people’s voices and plays music or relaxing sounds over them in your AirPods.

Why do I wake up to an industrial siren?

I made an alarm clock app that wakes me up with voice notes from friends and family.

They often start sweetly and get progressively angrier when you press snooze.

We can send each other music. Also it costs money to snooze.

This is something I’d wanted to build for years but couldn’t get working.

Then I found an open-source project by Freeman Jiang that solved the main problem, so I tried again.

Unison splits a song into different parts. Everyone in a room scans a QR code, and each phone plays a different part through its speaker.

With the right song, it sounds like a little band.

To hear the whole thing, you have to be together.

A podcast player that automatically skips the ads.

Because life’s too short to listen to podcasters shilling mattresses.

I remember calling the Nintendo hotline when I got stuck in Zelda. I recreated that feeling as an iOS game. It’s 1990, you work on the Nintendo helpline, and kids phone you because they’re stuck in their favourite games. You have to talk them through it.

A Pokémon-style game for me and my friends. Take a photo of any object and turn it into a fighter with random stats, then battle in a WhatsApp group. My toothbrush versus Al’s spider versus Sophie’s hairbrush. We crown a weekly champion.

I want to add commentary, news reports, podcasts and AI-generated blogs that discuss the fighters’ lore in absurd detail.

An app blocker that forces me to win an argument in Chinese before I can open distracting apps.

A keyboard that makes me type in Chinese to reply in English. An app that clones my voice so I can practise shadowing myself. And a memory-palace experiment that overlays 3D objects and imagery on Apple Maps.

Friends and family send in videos, pictures, texts and voice notes. An AI reporter turns them into a bulletin and gets reactions.

When it works, it’s genuinely funny. A kid scoring a goal at football gets treated as a world-historical event—which, to a small group of people, it is. I think it’s a glimpse of a personalised, sensational, but not exploitative social-media future.

▶ Watch on YouTube

My niece is obsessed with local wildlife, so I made her a daily news show. It gathers wildlife data, collects bird calls and produces a very serious two-minute report on what’s happening outside.

I used to be a teacher. It was painful to see children who were socially excluded and not know how best to help. Some struggle with joining a game or starting a conversation.

Video modelling teaches behaviours by showing someone successfully doing them. There’s research suggesting that watching a video of yourself performing a target behaviour can help some children develop social and communication skills.

Generative video could make those examples easier to tailor to a particular child and situation. I’m trying to set up a study to test whether that actually works. It feels like a natural fit for the technology, but it needs proper evidence.

A WarioWare-style game I made for @levelsio’s game-building competition. It came second out of more than 1,500 entries. It’s really fun.

“So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary.” David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs

Bufferi.ng helps you fake a bad connection on Zoom.

Suffering from Zoom fatigue?
Sick of meetings, get-togethers and conferences?
Boss asked a difficult question on video chat?

Bufferi.ng gives you a simple way to stutter your webcam and distort the sound.

P.S. It works on MS Teams, Skype and anything else that uses your computer’s webcam.

The passive-aggressive fightback starts here.

Featured in The Sun, Daily Mail, Hypebeast, El País, Les Echos and T3. See it on Product Hunt