Terry Cavanaugh makes some wacky games, or art pieces in this case. This website, and this itch page, are for his new project called Constellation. You type things in and they might appear onscreen. It’s free through the website, or for a name-your-own-price download on itch.
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Make iPhone Ringtones in Garageband
Most people have stopped syncing their iPhone with iTunes but the one big loss from that is loading your own custom ringtones, 9to5Mac’s Benjamin Mayo has a workaround using the free Garageband app from Apple. This process should really be easier.
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Nick Heer on the iPhone X
There are plenty of reviews out there now, but few had much time with the iPhone X before it was released because Apple chose to not give reviewers an opportunity to spend much time with it.
The iPhone X is a product that feels like it shouldn’t really exist — at least, not in consumers’ hands. I know that there are millions of them in existence now, but mine feels like an incredibly well-made, one-off prototype, as I’m sure all of them do individually. It’s not just that the display feels futuristic — I’ll get to that in a bit — nor is it the speed of using it, or Face ID, or anything else that you might expect. It is all of those things, combined with how nice this product is.
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Don’t Let Children Watch “YouTube Kids”
James Bridle has a terrifying and important article, it’s pretty long but the most important point is that people and businesses are systematically generating new videos for YouTube that appear to be tame pirated copies of shows like Peppa Pig but after a few minutes they change to be really awful and the YouTube app and site for kids don’t filter these out:
A step beyond the simply pirated Peppa Pig videos mentioned previously are the knock-offs. These too seem to teem with violence. In the official Peppa Pig videos, Peppa does indeed go to the dentist, and the episode in which she does so seems to be popular?—?although, confusingly, what appears to be the real episode is only available on an unofficial channel. In the official timeline, Peppa is appropriately reassured by a kindly dentist. In the version above, she is basically tortured, before turning into a series of Iron Man robots and performing the Learn Colours dance. A search for “peppa pig dentist” returns the above video on the front page, and it only gets worse from here
The reason why this crap skates by is because YouTube (and Google, and other companies) refuse to take responsibility for moderating what they host. Instead of hiring more people to moderate these things, the moderation is offloaded to algorithms and viewers.
Even if you only start a video on an official channel, auto play and the recommendations next to and after the video may take a viewer to another one.
tl;dr: Don’t let your kids watch YouTube. If you don’t have kids, please let your friends who do know about this problem.
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Brigador is Fun as Heck
The isometric mechsmasher by the Stellar Jockeys, Brigador, just got another update. This time they’ve gone and added different car horns to each pilotable vehicle so you can honk while you smash and shoot and trample and destroy every mcmansion you encounter. It’s good, I just streamed a bit of it on Twitch.
Brigador is available through the developer’s Humble widget for $18 (that’s the deluxe version with soundtrack) and or through Steam (Windows, macOS, Linux) for $14 while it’s on sale.