e529 — Shake, Shake, Shake Your iPhone

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iPhone and a shake with a straw on a table next to one another
Photo by Ravi Sharma on Unsplash

Published 15 September 2025

e529 with Michael, Andy and Michael – stories about AR glasses & snarky AI wearables, Carrot Weather, Rabbit OS2, shaking to summarize, Doomscrolling and a whole lot more.

Michael, Andy and Michael get things moving this episode with all things AI.  After starting with a parody about camera less phones which generate pictures, the team moves to an article about Amazon’s project Jayhawk AR glasses for their drivers.  Next up is a new gesture for Firefox users on iOS – the ability to shake to summarize.  After an article on AI audio manipulation, Andy and Michael M are reminded of how Denmark is providing a defense against deepfakes by updating copyrights to provide individuals the right to their own appearance and voice.

Following up on a plethora of stories in recent episodes on AI powered wearables, this episode takes on the Futurism article about the Friend pendant.  Apparently, this companion has a bit of a snarky personality by design, and that got the co hosts talking about Carrot’s weather application.  After mentioning that the Rabbit portable AI device gains a new OS upgrade, the team takes on a couple of game topics, including iPod click wheel game preservation and a Doomscroll game to try.

Would you rather play Doomscroll or just doomscroll manually?  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

These iPhone features are getting ridiculous!

(By Simon Meyer on IG (simonmeyer_director)

— John – 🎞️ Film Nerd 🎞️ (@UKFilmNerd) 2025-09-09T19:45:34.929Z

The Verge article: Amazon drivers could be wearing AR glasses with a built-in display next year

Amazon Accelerate Sept 16-18, 2025

Meta Connect Sept 17 – 18, 2025

The Verge article: Firefox launches ‘shake to summarize’ on iPhones

AskVG post: How to Disable and Remove All AI Features in Mozilla Firefox

Firefox article: Ready to shake things up?

News & Observer article: An NC senator’s words were manipulated by AI in an ad. Now she’s suing

The Guardian article: Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features

Futurism article: New AI Necklace Listens Constantly and Uses All That Data to Complain About You

Friend

Carrot Weather

rabbit post: rabbit overhauls r1 experience with rabbitOS 2

Games at Work e502: Humane Rabbits

Games

Retrododo article: The Complete Range Of iPod Clickwheel Games Has Finally Been Preserved

Ironic Sans post: Doomscrolling: The Game

Doomscroll

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:12 — 40.7MB) | Embed

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e528 — Monstrous Mice & Nano Bananas

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ChatGPT 5 generated image of a banana in the midst of an atom cloud generated 31 August 2025
ChatGPT 5 generated image of a banana in the midst of an atom cloud
generated 31 August 2025

Published 8 September 2025

e528 with Michael, Andy and Michael – stories about AI image editing with Nano Banana, GAN enabled LLM evolution with R-Zero, MentraOS open source smart glasses, automotive software, Making Monsters, Kazeta and a whole lot more.

Michael, Andy and Michael get things rolling with the Nano Banana image editing software from Google.  While the generated and altered images are very sophisticated, there are still a few tells that the photos came from AI.  An example from the Washington Post article calls out the “AI gibberish” replacement of numbers on the phone keypad – while the replacement of the human in the phone booth with a water buffalo replete with smart ring is ultra realistic.  Andy’s ChatGPT generated nano banana is a fun visualization for an atom-sized banana, even though he was “AI-splained” by the chatbot that “a banana at that scale couldn’t exist in any realistic way.” Ha!  

The team touches on a couple more AI stories dealing with with the Fast-VLM video captioning model and a generative adversarial network method of self evolving reasoning LLM with R-Zero.  Next is a springboard for the MentraOS open source smart glasses operating system that reminds the team of Andy’s experience in 2024 with the Brilliant Labs Monocle.  

Then the co-hosts talk about automotive software – and the challenges posed by the need to troubleshoot and correct for the intersection between evolving software and existing hardware.  The frequency for software updates for a vehicle, phones and more requires a level of testing and integration that can be very frustrating when things don’t work as expected.  Understatement of the year, I’m sure.

Wrapping up the episode are a couple of games – a kickstarter called Making Monsters, Office Job, which has a television sized screen and suitcase sized mouse and Kazeta for cartridge gaming.

What’s been your most frustrating automotive software experience?  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

Washington Post article: Masterful photo edits now just take a few words. Are we ready for this?

Nano Banana AI Image Editing

9 to 5 Mac article: You can try Apple’s lightning-fast video captioning model right from your browser

FastVLM-webgpu on Huggingface Spaces

Venture Beat article: Forget data labeling: Tencent’s R-Zero shows how LLMs can train themselves

R-Zero: Self-Evolving Reasoning LLM from Zero Data paper on arXiv

Unacceptable situation to wear camera glasses of the moment: while doing a bikini wax
futurism.com/wax-center-meta-g

— Mike Elgan (@MikeElgan) 2025-08-31T17:06:05.260Z

MentraOS Open Source Smart Glasses OS on Github

Games at Work e453: Vision Pro a Pro-Pro (for Brilliant Labs Frame)

Games at Work e436: Squishy Purple Doom (for Andy’s experience with Brilliant Labs Monocle)

Automotive Software

TechCrunch article: BMW, I am so breaking up with you

BMWblog post: Apple’s iOS 18 Update Is Causing BMW Digital Car Key Problems: Solutions Inside from October 2024

Games

Making Monsters on Kickstarter

Games at Work e455: Star Trek vs Douglas Adams (for Spore)

Felix Fisgus post: Office Job from 2022

hackster.io article: Alesh Slovak’s Kazeta Turns Mini-PCs Into ’90s Throwback “Cartridge”-Based Games Consoles

Kazeta

Image

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: 30:59 — 43.2MB) | Embed

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e527 — AI Taco Trolls

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Taco truck with the phrase “In tacos we trust” written across the front of the truck
Photo by Daniel Hooper 🌊 on Unsplash

Published 1 September 2025

e527 with Andy, Michael and Michael – stories about AI restaurant experiences, historical LLMs, zoetropes and a whole lot more.

After Michael R gives his impressions of the PhotoDome app, the team starts things off with a story about the AI powering Taco Bell’s drive through point of sale experience.  In the past few days, there have been a multitude of stories about the attempt to order 18,000 cups of water from the Yum Foods franchise.  Check out the conversation in the podcast and the referenced articles in the show notes below.  Continuing on the AI and restaurant theme, the team considers another article that reports on nonexistent specials that the restaurant has to deal with.  While discussing the Wired article about which jobs AI is eliminating first, Michael M (mistakenly!) references a zoom seminar on the subject from Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Digital Economy Lab.  This seminar is scheduled for 29 September, so there’s still plenty of time to register for it at the link below!  After touching on a couple of articles dealing with ChatGPT scanning conversations and instituting parental controls, the team switches to an AI use case that is very close to home for Andy’s educational background as a historian.  Check out the GitHub link to TimeCapsuleLLM below and give it a whirl for yourself! 

The team wraps up this episode with two interesting links – the trailer for the upcoming game The Expanse, and a fantastic piece of vinyl zoetrope technology from Atliens (please check out the link to see the visual for the alien abduction visuals – so cool!)

What is your favorite vinyl zoetrope?  We’d love to share it with the Games at Work audience!   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

PhotoDome reprise

Random Thoughts blog post: PhotoDome for visionOS

PhotoDome

Games at Work e526: Beans and Bricks (for the initial discussion on PhotoDome)

AI

The Verge article: Taco Bell’s AI drive-thru plan gets caught up on trolls and glitches

AI Business article: Taco Bell Expands AI Voice Ordering at Drive-Thrus Nationwide

BBC article: Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters

Wikipedia article: Troll

Futurism article: Local Restaurant Exhausted as Google AI Keeps Telling Customers About Daily Specials That Don’t Exist

Games at Work e522: Pointing at Doomed Fish (for how Google’s AI Overview oversimplifies)

Wired article: AI Is Eliminating Jobs for Younger Workers

Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence paper and seminar: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence

Futurism article: OpenAI Says It’s Scanning Users’ ChatGPT Conversations and Reporting Content to the Police

The Verge article: OpenAI will add parental controls for ChatGPT following teen’s death

Games at Work e524: Googlenight AI (for discussion on publishing exchanges with ChatGPT)

Ars Technica article: College student’s “time travel” AI experiment accidentally outputs real 1834 history

Github: haykgrigo3/TimeCapsuleLLM

Software

atliensofficial.com post: Leaving The World Behind Vinyl

Image

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: 28:06 — 39.2MB) | Embed

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e526 — Beans and Bricks

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photo of a can of black beans resting on top of two red clay bricks
Photo by Michael Martine, Chapel Hill, NC August 2025

Published 25 August 2025

e526 with Andy and Michael M – stories about focus – finding things that are missing, reducing distractions with apps like Focus Friend and Brick, viewing photo collections and a whole lot more.

Andy and Michael M get things rolling while Michael R is away, starting with an update from Andy’s recent presentation at FrOSCon 2025.  Then the pair focus on an always on AI smart glasses concept, replete with all of the privacy and security considerations.  Next up is an AI powered image search that resulted in the discovery of a long missing hiker.  This reminded Michael of crowdsourced image searches powered by humans for search and rescue, and found the story of Jim Gray which was part of e44 back in 2013.  Next in view is Vivo’s  announcement of their mixed reality headset, followed quickly by a Vison Pro photo viewing app called PhotoDome.

Continuing on the concept of focus, Andy and Michael take a look at the Focus Friend app, which has a friendly bean shaped avatar that knits and unlocks prizes while the user remains focused on their task, and gets sad when interrupted.  This reminded Andy of the Brick app, which he learned about from the hiro.report.  The Brick app and physical tile creates the necessary friction to have the user bring the phone close to the Brick tile to “unbrick” the phone.  The lengths required to create such friction to improve productivity spark a further discussion on the challenges that immersive software create for person to person connections and the increase in loneliness.

The team wraps up this episode with a callback to 2023 for software restricted Polish train repairs and software enabled subscriptions to increase automotive performance.

What apps, systems or techniques have you used for creating focus?  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

FrOSCon 2025

media.ccc.de Decentralising Freedom: Open Source for Sovereignty

AI

TechCrunch article: Harvard dropouts to launch ‘always on’ AI smart glasses that listen and record every conversation

Wired article: A Hiker Was Missing for Nearly a Year. Then an AI System Spotted His Helmet

Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences UC Berkley technical report UCB/EECS-2010-142 : Searching for Jim Gray: A Technical Overview

Games at Work e49: Crowdsourcing & Crowdfunding

AR / VR

9 to 5 Mac article: Vivo’s Vision Pro clone costs $1,400 and weighs 398g

Vivo press release: vivo Unveils First Mixed Reality Headset and New Imaging Strategy at 30th Anniversary

PhotoDome on Apple Vision Pro is a delightful way to revisit photos and albums. Combining XR concepts and interfaces with the rest of my computing life is why I'm so excited about visionOS. The developer of this app did an amazing job

apps.apple.com/us/app/photodom

— Joseph Simpson (@vrhermit) 2025-08-22T11:50:24.588Z

PhotoDome

Focus: Beans and Bricks

Tedium post: Me And The Bean

Focus Friend by Hank Green

IMDb: Mr. Bean

Brick

hiro.report

BBC Research and Development feature: Where is the social internet taking us?

Repairs and Upgrades

TechDirt article: Train Maker Sues Hackers For Exposing Dodgy Efforts To Make Train Repairs More Difficult

Games at Work e444: Glitch in the Matrix

BBC article: VW introduces monthly subscription to increase car power

Image

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: 35:24 — 49.2MB) | Embed

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