e533 — Rings of Power

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Powerful rings on asphalt each seeming to emit columns of light
Photo by Fallon Michael on Unsplash

Published 17 November 2025

e533 with Andy, Michael and Michael – rings to chart the heavens and control your home, repurposing smart TVs, retro La Machine and Vectrex hardware made newly available, new Valve Steam hardware and a whole lot more.

Andy, Michael and Michael start things off with a 400 year old ring that unfolds into an astronomy tool.  Check out this amazing technology in the show notes below.  If you want to have such a ring of your own, the design team from Black Adept have them available for sale!  Sticking with the theme, the next powerful ring follows the Tron Master Control Disk concept.  This interesting design expression reminded Michael M of the Mini circular dashboard display.

Next up is a great way to repurpose an old TV.  The team explores an article with instructions for making a smart mirror using two way glass and a Raspberry Pi.  You may want to ensure that the TV has the automatic content recognition features turned off.  Andy remarks on the continuing evolution over the years of the Magic Mirror software that enables this to work.  After talking about the bright idea of using the circuity of a smart lightbulb to serve as a Minecraft server, the cohosts look La Machine.

Then the team takes a look at the recent announcements from Valve.  New Steam hardware has captured their imagination.  The Steam Machine, Steam Frame and a new Steam controller provides great excitement for the platform.  Wrapping up the episode, Michael R takes a look at the World of Warcraft new in game currency used for building houses.  The blog post announcing this from Blizzard has 2,817 replies when these show notes were written!  

What legacy hardware would you most like to have again?  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

Maker

A 400-Year-Old Ring that Unfolds to Track the Movements of the Heavens
openculture.com/2025/11/a-400-

— Ronan (@ronanmcd) 2025-11-06T12:16:00.036Z

Open Culture article: A 400-Year-Old Ring that Unfolds to Track the Movements of the Heavens

hackster.io article: Welcome to the Grid

IMDb post: Tron movies and tv shows

Mini car circular dashboard display
Photo by Nicole Logan on Unsplash

Boy Genius Report article: You Can Use Your Old TV As A Smart Mirror – Here’s How

Raspberry Pi

Magic Mirror^2 documentation

Games at Work e479: Listen Up Outlaws! for smart tv automatic content recognition

Tom’s Hardware article: Hardware hacker installs Minecraft server on a cheap smart lightbulb — single 192 MHz RISC-V core with 276KB of RAM, enough to run tiny 90K byte world

La Machine

Gaming Hardware (and Software)

Games Industry article: Valve announces 3 new Steam hardware devices: Steam Machine, VR headset Steam Frame, and a new Steam controller

PC Gamer article: Valve announces the Steam Frame: ‘a new way to play your entire Steam library’

Eurogamer article: How did Valve design its new Steam Machine? It started with the fan, of course

Kickstarter: Vectrex Mini

The Verge article: World of Warcraft is getting a new kind of fake money

Blizzard blog post: Developer Insight: Hearthsteel Virtual Currency and Housing in Midnight

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: 32:16 — 44.9MB) | Embed

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e532 — Spooky Scary Tech Skeletons

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Spooky skeletons sitting on a mantle that see no evil, hear no evil and say no evil
Photo by Chris Charles on Unsplash

Published 3 November 2025

e532 with Michael and Michael – Halloween Spooktacular edition with AI whale communications & implications, robotic vacuums that phone home, ad supported TVs and a whole lot more.

For the Halloween spooktacular edition of Games at Work, Michael and Michael start things off with an article about AI decoding whale’s communications, and the potential for the recognition of whales’ rights.  There have been multiple discussions about the promise of understanding non-human communications over the years on Games at Work, and a couple of these are included in the show notes links below.

Next up is a series of articles the benefits and challenges of internet of things powered hardware, and the challenges they present.  First, a discussion on the remote software feature removal, in the case of the Futurism article, when the owner blocked the transmissions from his IoT vacuum, that the software running the bot was changed to make it stop working.  Then, there is a story about free TV hardware that requires an ELUA to run a second screen of advertising.  After considering this free, ad supported TV, the co-hosts muse what other hardware might be made available at no cost, and with an advertising stream.  Changes to streaming television to insert more advertising has become more common.  Michael and Michael explore the idea of an IoT refrigerator with a screen might become an ad supported platform, and that to access certain functionality, the screen may require the user to watch an advertising video.  After the cloud outage from last week, there have been articles that discuss how the hardware behaves without the constant internet connection.  An example of this is the malfunctions from an internet connected bed.

Sticking with the robot and advertising theme, Michael R highlights Sandwich’s immersive commercial making use of the new Blackmagic camera to capture an immersive video for Robot.com.  After touching on Apple’s Family Sharing and CarPlay capabilities and Windows 11 immersive ultra wide mode, Michael M wraps up the show with a quick point on The Simulation Hypothesis book and the LEGO Arcade Machine that opens up to have a minifig’s gamer room inside the cabinet.

What ad supported free hardware would you accept?  What data streams would you not allow your IoT devices to hear / see / say?  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

Inside Climate News article: AI Is Decoding Whales’ Communications. Could That Be a Turning Point in the Push for Their Rights?

Games at Work e466: AI’s Perfect Vacation from May 2024 for machine learning decoding the sperm whale alphabet

Games at Work e495: Personal Planetarium from December 2024 for talking with animals via AI, Sandwich Vision

Technology

Futurism article: Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House

Games at Work e235: Bots on Batuu from June 2019 for discussion on vacuum bots

Games at Work e260: 1984 Tesla for Sale from February 2020 for discussion on remote software feature removal

Creative Bloq article: You can now get a TV for free… and I’m worried this is the future of tech

Ars Technica article: Samsung makes ads on $3,499 smart fridges official with upcoming software update

Ars Technica article: AWS outage reminds us why $2,449 Internet-dependent beds are a bad idea

More Technology

Six Colors article: Hello, Robot: Sandwich launches “immersive commercial”

9 to 5 Mac article: Mother describes the dark side of Apple’s Family Sharing when a relationship ends

Daring Fireball article:  CarPlay Seems Essential for Rental Fleets

The Verge article: Windows 11’s Vision Pro-like remote desktop is now widely available on Quest 3

Two More Things

The Simulation Hypothesis 2nd Edition by Rizwan Virk

LEGO Arcade Machine 40805

Two Bonus Game Things

The Register article: This is Doom, running headless, on Ubuntu Arm… on a satellite

Engadget article: Board is a $500 board game console with 12 original titles

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: 34:00 — 47.3MB) | Embed

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e531 – Games and Such

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A cyber wizard holding a clock
Epredator created AI Generated image

Michael R and Ian “Epredator” Hughes get together for a chat about , , and . We talk about some of our favorite comfort games, how they are procedurally generated, and how the gaming business model has bifurcated between ongoing money grabs and lovingly created indie games.

Show Links

Games:

Battlemarked

No Man’s Sky

Return to the Mines of Moria

AI:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:02 — 44.6MB) | Embed

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e530 — Vibe It! – Ready Player Chum

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Friendly bipedal robot strolling down a path
Photo by Kindel Media from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-robot-toy-on-gray-concrete-floor-9026299/

Published 29 September 2025

e530 with Michael and Michael – an AI extravaganza with vibe coding, AI gaming chums, rating LLMs via Infocom games, robots for construction, self assembling space habitats and a whole lot more.

Michael and Michael get things moving this episode with an AI extravaganza while Andy is away.  The co hosts start things off with a vibe coding assistant to help you with your QBasic programming needs.  Next up, the pair consider a couple of stories dealing with assistants who can help users be more effective in playing games.  There is a real Goldilocks zone for the assistant to help the player remain in a state of flow, where the game is neither too easy due to the assistant’s help, nor too frustrating to play.  Michael R gives an example of his trying to get to Orc Town to progress in Mines of Moria.  Continuing on the theme of AIs playing games, Michael and Michael take a look at TextQuests, where a variety of LLMs take up the challenge of playing Infocom text based games.  With all the discussion on AI slop in the news, the article from Computerworld about the mathematical inevitability of hallucinations is particularly timely.

Michael and Michael move from AI to robotics and take a look at the construction bot from Dusty Robotics, which prints out a life size blueprint directly on the floor.  Michael M shares a space habitat construction solution from Aurelia that uses magnets to self assemble in orbit.  Michael R shares a story about the engineering feat of moving a viking ship without damaging it, which reminded Michael M of the challenge of moving the Cape Hatteras lighthouse.  Check out the links below for all the details.

What would your ideal game chum be like?  What do you think about the current state of AI chum?  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

hackaday.io AI Coding Assistant for Microsoft QBasic

Engadget article: Google is turning Gemini into a gaming sidekick with a new Android overlay

PC Gamer article: Microsoft’s new Gaming Copilot AI tool promises to be ‘your personal gaming sidekick’ but it mostly seems to do the work of a Google search, with the potential for ‘hallucinations’

Games at Work e488: Fight. For Your Right. To Pla-aaay! for Jane McGonigal and flow 

The Gamer article: How To Find Orc Town In The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria

404 Media article: AI-Powered Animal Crossing Villagers Begin Organizing Against Tom Nook

TextQuests.ai 

Wikipedia article: Infocom

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws
computerworld.com/article/4059

— Charlie Stross (@cstross) 2025-09-21T17:14:32.576Z

Computerworld article: OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws

Rule 34 by Charles Stross

Accelerando by Charles Stross

Games at Work e306: Weak Ties for Accelerando 

hitchhikers.fandom.com: Infinite Improbability Drive

Washington Post article: AI firm Deepseek writes less secure code for groups China disfavors

Robots

Dusty Robotics

Aurelia: Tesserae: Self-Assembling Prototypes

Magnatiles

This is Colossal article: A Feat of Engineering Transports the World’s Best-Preserved Viking Ship to Its New Home

National Park Service article: Moving the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse

Two More Things

Six Colors article: Apple Announces a New Set of Immersive Film Releases

Random Thoughts post: My AirPods Review

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: 31:47 — 44.3MB) | Embed

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