e538 — MagSafe Stacking

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cairn with quartz and other rocks on a trail in Blowing Rock, NC
Photo by Michael Martine, Blowing Rock, NC 2022

Published 12 January 2026

e538 with Michael, Michael and Andy – Stories and discussion on CES2026, EuroTech, PhoneTech, AI playing your games for you so you can watch and a whole lot more.

Andy, Michael and Michael take a look at many of the announcements from CES, and share a few of their favorites.  CES is the annual Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas, Nevada.  In the phone technology arena, there are several MagSafe examples that magnetically snap onto an iPhone, such as charger that looks kind of like a floppy disk.  Another example is a keyboard, with tactile buttons you can type with in portrait or landscape mode.  The keyboard creates a form factor that is reminiscent of the Danger Hiptop / Sidekick.  Between these examples and others (like a second screen e-reader that snaps to the back of a phone), the cohosts mull what it would be like to stack several of them in sequence.

After discussing the Punkt phone, and the Proton suite enabled by the AphyOS, the team turns their attention to several other innovations shared at CES.  Lollypops that play music, a vibrating chef’s knife, and the Lepro AMI AI companion all caught their eye.  The Lepro AMI seems similar, at least in the form factor, to the Gatebox, which was first discussed on Games at Work back in 2017.

Next, the team takes a look at a fork of a decompilation of SuperMario 64, where the developer added a physical coin slot and updated the code to allow for micro transactions with physical money.  Then, following on a post from Mike Elgan, the co-hosts consider an article about Sony’s patent to take over a player’s avatar in case they get stuck and want help to continue their game.  It’s kind of like your own personal AI Twitch channel.  The Games at Work team considered a similar story about Microsoft’s gaming Copilot in 2025.

Speaking of Microsoft, Michael M got excited about the potential triumphant return of Clippy, only to realize that it was clickbait.  

Would you like to have an AI show you how to get past a tricky game boss, or play through it for you?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know! 

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  All rights reserved.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Links

CES2026

www.ces.tech The Consumer Electronics Show

Retrododo article: This Adorable Floppy Disk MagSafe Battery Pack Is My New EDC Fave

KBDcraft.store Kit Shamshel Mouse

Liliputing article: Clicks Power Keyboard is a magnetic thumb keyboard & wireless power bank for your phone

ohsnap.com: MCON, the magnetic transforming gaming controller

Vice article: The Sidekick Was Pop Culture’s Most Stylish and Innovative Cellphone

Belkin iPhone Mount with MagSafe for Mac Notebooks

punkt.ch blog post: Punkt. unveils MC03, latest version of its unique smartphone offering giving users full control over personal data and usage.

AphyOS

Mashable article: The weirdest tech of CES: It gets very weird, very fast

Games at Work e520: Cold Fusion Gaming (for the Gatebox virtual companion)

tech.eu article: CES 2026 showcases Europe’s hardware renaissance

Reverse Engineering Microtransactions into Retro Games

Hackaday article: Super Mario 64, Now With Microtransactions

AI

Sony AI plays video games, so you don't have to! futurism.com/artificial-intell

— Mike Elgan (@MikeElgan) 2026-01-09T01:30:33.730Z

WIPO Patentscope : WO2025080356 – AI GENERATED GHOST PLAYER

Games at Work e530: Vibe It!  Ready Player Chum (for Microsoft’s Gaming Copilot)

PCWorld article: Microsoft pushes huge Copilot update with features like Clippy 2.0

Microsoft blog: Meet Copilot Mode in Edge: Your AI browser

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Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own.

Michael Martine

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e537 — Reading, Listening & Building Together

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guitar chord
Photo by Scott Gruber on Unsplash

Published 4 January 2026

e537 with Michael M and Andy – ringing in the new year with the amazing power of music to move and heal, LEGO and retro builds and a whole lot more.

Andy, Michael and Michael would like to wish all of our listeners a very happy 2026!

Michael M and Andy start off 2026 on a good note – or perhaps better said – a series of good notes.  Michael shares some of his vacation reading, beginning with the book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord by Daniel Levitin.  In this book, Levitin highlights the power of music to move and heal, and provides a Linktree to listen to the songs featured in the book, which is included in the show notes below.  One particular example from the book was the Ella Fitzgerald recording of Mack the Knife in Berlin, and the magic she created in the moment when she forgot the lyrics.

Andy highlights an amazing musical creation moment with Jacob Collier’s improvisation with the National Symphony Orchestra.  This reminded Michael of Rosamund Stone Zander & Benjamin Zander’s book, Art of Possibility, and maestro Zander’s TED talk on the power of classical music.  Michael also brought up David Byrne’s book, How Music Works, and his learning in Puerto Rico on how dancers conduct the musicians as they perform together.

Byrne discussed mixtapes in his book, and the modern equivalent of them are the playlist, which is exactly what Levitin’s Linktree leads to.  Michael created a mixtape to express musically what he was trying to say in words for his NCSSM convocation speech at the start of the 2025-26 school year.  Andy shares a couple of intriguing ways to create music through retro devices and common household products – all of these are in the links below.

Moving to the building part of the episode, Andy and Michael start off with LEGO, and this is about to be a banner year for the company with so many new sets coming on the market.  There’s a new LEGO Icons building, which has in it a music store and includes a sousaphone player minifig.  The cohosts touch on the Star Trek Enterprise set which was also just launched, which includes a minifig of Commander Riker with his trombone.  Andy describes the awesomeness that is the LEGO GameBoy with the inventive buttons on the device, and the team then touch on a couple of retro consoles such as the Commodore 64 reboot.

The team wraps up this episode with a mention of Andy’s grumpiness on the year end Tech Grumps podcast.

What music has inspired you in 2025?  What builds (LEGO, retro or otherwise) are you planning for 2026?   Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know! 

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  All rights reserved.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Links

Reading

I Heard There Was a Secret Chord by Daniel J Levitin

Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, Die Driegroschenoper – listen to the “Moritat von Mackie Messer” excerpt sung by Bertholt Brecht in the Featured Audio & Video section

Games at Work e485: Barbarians at the Rhubarb Bar (for flow, and of course Barbara’s Rhabarberbar)

Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander & Benjamin Zander

Benjamin Zander’s TED talk: The transformative power of classical music

Games at Work e9: Reality is Broken (for Jane McGongial’s book, and Benjamin Zander’s Ode to Joy)

How Music Works by David Byrne

Listening

Wikipedia article: Mixtape

Listen to the songs featured in A Secret Chord – https://linktr.ee/secretchord

Michael M’s Apple Music Mixtape for NCSSM’s convocation

Michael M’s Spotify Mixtape for NCSSM’s convocation

Making of Boléro by Linus A Kesson

Building LEGO and more

LEGO Icons Shopping Street #11371, with sousaphone musician (see picture 13 in photo gallery)

LEGO Icons Star Trek: U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D™ #10356 with trombone player Commander Riker

minifigs.me 

LEGO Gameboy #70246 build and additional new Retro Console #31380

Wired article: Review: Commodore 64 Ultimate

The Lost Outpost blog post: Retro-tastic!

Other Stranger Things

Woe Industries game 

TechGrumps 3.3.5: – Bless The TechGrumps (Special holiday special) 

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Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own.

Michael Martine

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e536 — Can we skip all AI this time?

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Photo by Alexander Grigoryev on Unsplash

Published 22 December 2025

e536 with Andy, Michael R, and guest host newly-retired Ian “Epredator” Hughes – a dive into gaming in 2025, retro computing and games, how to fix old paintings, and what’s coming to the public domain on January 1st.

The show kicks off with a number of gaming topics, discussing what the hosts have been playing lately, including the results of the Steam Replay for 2025. There’s also a chat about Commodore (joysticks, and the new Commodore 64 Ultimate), ZX Spectrum, and other retro machines. Netflix has been making acquisitions in the gaming space, where will they lead?

Michael is fascinated by the process of restoring old paintings; Andy and Ian have seen a lot more of this on TV in the UK!

In the wrap, the hosts cover an incident of apparent smart glasses-induced rage on the subway; and briefly talk about what’s coming into the Public Domain on January 1st 2026.

Wishing all our listeners a happy and peaceful break to close out 2025, and we’ll be back with new episodes in 2026.

Selected Links

Gaming

Makers

Media

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e535 — The Poetry of DOOM

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Writing poetry on a typewriter
Photo by David Klein on Unsplash

Published 15 December 2025

e535 with Michael M and Andy – adversarial poetry to jailbreak LLMs, iFixit’s FixBot, power of digital twins, putting the breaks on Rewind, Nintendo Virtual Boy and a whole lot more.

Michael M and Andy start things off with a most intriguing concept – adversarial poetry.  By using ‘memetic language’, researchers formulated prompts with imagery and metaphor instead of direct operational phrasing to trick LLMs into providing unsafe responses.  Michael makes the point that AI prompts are becoming more and more like spells or incantations.  See the show notes below for a link to the paper for any budding AI poet laureate wannabes.  Perhaps Jabberwocky can be used in a snicker snack way.  

Switching to another AI use case, Andy and Michael discuss the iFixit FixBot.  The FixBot provides expert advice and guidance for repairs, by talking to the human who likely needs both hands to effect the repair.  
Next up are a couple of stories on digital twins, and how they leverage game technology.  By taking sufficient data points to create a digital twin, multiple attempts can be made virtually to see the improvement before applying the capability to the non-digital twin.  Andy is reminded of an article that outlines the affinity between the metaverse and digital twin concepts.  Nvidia has a concept of this in their Omniverse capability.  Another example of a digital twin with a game overlay is the Job Simulator Game.  This game is written as a 2050 historical virtual reality environment allowing the player to experience what it was like to have a job in 2020.  This fun VR historical reenactment experience is one of the stories that Tobi Lütke discussed in his recent interview with the Acquired team.

Staying on the VR simulation theme, Andy and Michael take a look at the Rats Play Doom game which trains rats in an immersive way to play Doom.  

In the last section of the episode, the team takes a look at some metaverse news.  Meta has acquired limitless.ai and is shutting down Rewind on the Mac, and is also shifting more investment from the metaverse to AI.  Wrapping up the episode, Michael and Andy look at the Nintendo Virtual Boy and Xteink 4.

What poetry would you write to prompt an LLM? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know! 

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  All rights reserved.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Links

AI

PC Gamer article: Poets are now cybersecurity threats: Researchers used ‘adversarial poetry’ to trick AI into ignoring its safety guard rails and it worked 62% of the time

arXiv paper: Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models

Gilbert & Sullivan: Hail Poetry

The Verge article: iFixit’s FixBot helps with repairs ‘the way a master technician would’

iFixit: Introducing FixBot: We Built an AI That Actually Knows How to Fix Things

Digital Twins

ComputerWorld article: Digital twin tech is a double-edged sword

ComputerWorld article: ‘Digital twin’ tech is twice as great as the metaverse

Nvidia Omniverse

Job Simulator Game

acquired.fm AC2 interview: How to Live in Everyone Else’s Future (with Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke)

Games at Work e490: Codename – “Amelia” (for digital twins)

Doom

Reddit post: Open-source VR framework for training rats to play DOOM

Rats Play Doom

Metaverse

9 to 5 Mac article: Rewind Mac app shutting down following Meta’s acquisition of Limitless

limitless.ai 

WSJ article: Meta Plans to Shift Spending Away From the Metaverse

Retrododo article: Virtual Boy Accessory For Nintendo Switch/Switch 2 Is Available For Pre-Order

My Nintendo Store: Virtual Boy for Nintendo Switch 2/Nintendo Switch

Tech

The Verge article: This tiny magnetic e-reader sticks to the back of your iPhone

Xteink x4

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Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own.

Michael Martine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:13 — 50.4MB) | Embed

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