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This is GamesItWork.biz, your weekly podcast about gaming, technology, and play.
Your hosts are Michael Martine, Andy Piper, and Michael Rowe.
The thoughts and opinions on this podcast are those of the hosts and guests alone,
and are not the opinions of any organization which they have been, are, or may be, affiliated with.
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This is episode 511, Vibing in London.
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Hello and welcome again to another edition of games of work.biz.
Good morning, good evening, good afternoon to everybody.
Whatever you're listening to this, this is Michael Martine.
One of your three co-hosts of this said show,
and we are really, really happy to be all together here to have a few conversations on technology with everyone.
Michael Rowe is dancing away over there, so Michael, how you doing?
I'm doing well because as you say, we are vibin' into some technology fun Andy.
Yeah, I mean, when you consider that vibe coding as basically making up as you go along and with whatever you feel like, that's pretty much my life and I'll show. So yeah, for sure. Let's do some vibe life in or vibe casting. I'm going to break the illusion though and say that as I look at my window, it's early evening in here in London. So no matter what, timeless time zone you're in right now, as you listen to podcast.
That's exactly what we do.
As we record, it's evening for me, it's afternoon for the Michaels, and yes, let's get down to some tech.
Yes, absolutely. So the the first thing up for us is a nine to five Mac article
With the notion of what Apple apparently wanted people to be able to do So we've talked about vibe coding in a couple of different episodes and it's easy to imagine the notion of speaking things into existence Especially when you're in a virtual reality. So do you need to be able to code to say I would like to have a beach ball in front of me that I can
now kind of touch a maneuver in my virtual space.
That might answer that would be no of course not. That should be kind of fun. But Michael our resident Apple vision pro expert here.
What what did you take from this idea of could you vibe code for vision pro?
Well, what I take from it is actually, you know, the story is really two years old long before the hype of vibe coding came into existence and that's the interesting part and the fact that Mike Rockwell who oversaw all the development of the vision pro is now heading up all the Siri development for Apple, this is more interesting because he did have that vision and tried to push the teams to improve things and.
I started using the vision pro when it first came out, it was definitely a device designed for Siri and Siri just wasn't good enough for it so it's kind of interesting to see this kind of backstory coming in, especially as we get closer and closer to WWC and roughly a month.
super cool. Well, we'll, we'll white and see what Siri has in store for us in just a little bit. Next up on our list deals with the or a ring once more because we've talked about this once or twice as well. And we know Andy that you've got both the or a ring and an Apple watch and you're showing both of those, which is awesome. So have you ever done a step off, uh, competition to see which one is even better.
I haven't and the reason is partly for exactly the reason that this story goes into which is what they are useful for.
I think the aura ring is really good for just overall general feeling understanding the I don't really need to ever take it off, I mean I do occasionally for a charging but it's a very continuous thing, it has now started to add a little bit of alerting or a little
prompting to let you know when things change so today for example I had something telling me that over the last 30 days of my heart rate baseline has gone down slightly and it's a good thing and earlier in the week I think I had a message saying that my stress levels had seemed to be up a little bit and it hadn't given me those direct notifications previously. So I think those are things that have come into the or software recently. The Apple Watch is much more useful for directly checking exactly what's going on. If I want to do a heart rate check in the moment, I can put my finger tip on there and get that that stuff checked. If I want to, you know, if I'm exercising, I want to track my steps actively because I'm out for a walk or want to check my pace, then I can immediately see that sort of thing on the screen. You can't get that sort of information from the or a ring because
screen and it doesn't have that interface.
You mentioned the ordering gives you these notifications.
Does it have a tap or something?
Or is it just through, like, phone notifications?
Yeah, phone notification. So in fact, I got them on the watch and then looked it up on the on the on the devices where I got my Apple notifications. So yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't have any haptics on there. And I don't think the, the newer version has either, because obviously you need to put a motor of some level into the device to enable that kind of thing.
OK.
So no, there's none of that. And that's fine. That's absolutely cool. That's, that's not what I've
It's interesting, we are talking before the show about multiple devices giving you different input.
One of the things that I've been using for, gosh, many years now is the form, swim goggles,
and I've compared it recently to the swim metrics on the Apple Watch, and in that case,
the Apple Watch gets it wrong.
The form you would think would actually not do as well, but it must sense better when touch the wall, because
the apple watch usually is in the duration of my entire swim, one or two laps behind.
Which makes no sense, because you would think touching the wall,
both devices could feel that, you know, bump.
When you hit the wall, but the apple watch everyone's wall gets one or two laps behind.
Uh, yeah, before we, when we were doing our pre-show conversation, it was all about, um,
different algorithms for different devices are going to return different results.
And I think Michael, you joked actually, uh, earlier this week of a person who's wearing two watches,
you know, it's probably just doesn't know what time it is, right? Because those two watches are not going to be the same either. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, an article that I came across this
exactly. A person with one watch is certain what time it is, a person with two
and I thought was intriguing, uh, is the variation on, you aren't going to need it,
which is sort of a, um, uh, as the, as the blog post says, a standard piece of advice that helps you avoid over engineering, goal plating, uh, trying to do too much at once. And the, uh,
Y-A-G-N-I, you aren't going to need it. Well, the variation on that theme is you are going to read it. Y-A-G-R-I.
and I was super intrigued by this conversation.
If data gets deleted, there is a reason for the data to be deleted, and if it was deleted for a reason that might not be intuitive or that might not be discoverable in the moment because the data is gone.
But if you were to flag it for deletion and have some record timestamp and other information around it, that may well be valuable in the future.
that data for training purposes or you're just using that for reporting or other
purposes, I thought this was a very intriguing kind of thing, especially around the whole data mining process of leveraging timestamps, reverse engineering process flows and how all that might come together.
Anything strike you guys.
Well, I was I was looking up Scott Antipa Antipa the guy who wrote this and and his his blog is probably the one of the most minimalistic blogs I've seen in a very long time
And I was wondering how this one came across your your feed
But I did I did find it interesting
I'm very well read, Michael.
I thought you're like blue like a little color light blue Carolina blue
Um, I, I guess the, the one.
The question that I had is I understand the concepts of soft elites, especially when you're talking about an enterprise setting and things of that nature, um, and I, I was, I was thinking about the discussion that, that we had again offline about data privacy and we talked about on the show a lot too.
And if you implement this as an overall approach, then the likelihood of data being used for purposes beyond its original purpose becomes easier to happen because it's now available.
available. It's only soft deleted.
So I totally agree and understand what the guy said in the article, but I'm wondering what the second and third order impacts are.
Yeah, it's storage right how much storage do you have and what's the cost of that and is it worth that right?
Don't care about me. Yeah, that's probably the cheapest part. It's privacy and other data issues for me at least.
Yeah, should be, could be.
All right, like in a long, we have something that I personally
don't have a lot of experience around.
I've had a little bit of exposure to kindles and other ink kinds of capabilities,
but Andy, you came across figment
and wanted to maybe say some interesting things about your experiences with this e-ink platform.
Well, not this particular one. I mean, I've got a bunch of E-ink devices and we had a similar story,
not so long ago where there was a kickstarter for an E-ink based games console and then that got bought a midway through or very early on in the funding process and has kind of vanished for now.
I assume it will come back at some point. The E-ink displays are getting faster,
so you've got that daylight computer we talked about not so long ago as well, which had the
at the faster.
So that you could more or less use the screen as a live screen without the refresh delay.
This particular device, if you watch the video, still very much has the delay.
But it's basically being used for visual novel/adventure game multi-multiple choice type things.
Which is quite a nice idea, I think.
I like the way that they pitch it similar to sunlight computer as the daylight computer.
I think you're a big your pardon as the slow computing.
So much more calm, less in your face, less next version of online, shoot them up, whatever,
with millions of players, which we'll talk about in a moment.
But much more of a calm sort of environment.
I'm seeing here in displays reach price points where they're much more accessible.
For a lot more devices than they used to be, they're refresh rates are much better, and obviously they have that fact that they can be active after the contents of the display can be active after the devices switched off, which can have nice effects as well.
So I find this interesting. It's not dissimilar to things we've spoken about in the last six months, so we've seen in the last six months with other manufacturers.
I'm curious to see where it goes and how popular it becomes.
There's there's a lot of devices lately and I was trying to find the name of one that a friend of mine has
that are eating note takers
That have have gotten pretty powerful matter of fact the one that he has is
fully integrated with cloud services and the entire development team all have them and so they use that to take notes during meetings and have it
Yeah
reflected across to each other and
I do think that you know Andy to your point on the fact that the
The natural state when powered off is to retain the last image that was displayed there right is is a great feature And I remember my very very first Kindle that I had which was the first gen one with the keyboard at the bottom and it kind of a wedge shape and everything
I really like the fact that it would keep the book cover the book you were reading
when you powered it off. So it was kind of
that feeling of having a book. And while I do read a lot of e-books, now I pretty much exclusively read them on my iPad, but I still have a Kindle, and I've just kind of gotten out of that ecosystem. So I think the form factor that they should have for this device, particularly the E-Aint console and and figment are interesting from a gaming perspective.
Of using those info-com games right from from days of lore.
Not sure I would dedicate a new device just for that, for that and reading.
But if I was just going to get a reading only device, I think ink is probably the better way to go.
When I was in Taipei a few months ago, I went to one of the huge seven-storey departments,
store-type places which have all the electronics and there was a whole area for e-ink readers of different form factors and you can get complete Android tablets that are e-ink displays.
You can get Kindle form factor devices which have much faster.
I saw Terence Eden recently posted about trying out a six-color e-ink conference badge.
That technology is moving really quite fast and improving a lot and prices will come down.
I think this is really fascinating stuff.
and showing up in places that are maybe a couple of years ago unexpected but are more ubiquitous so in one of our local grocery stores right now there are e-ink displays very small ones that are showing prices for the groceries behind them which allows very dynamic changes near instantaneous changes if you think about it but make it really hard to see well what's on sale because the e-ink doesn't really pop to let you know this things on sale that isn't
I think we talked about them four or five years ago because I saw them at CES back then and the thing was they were going to allow for instant price discrimination.
Oh yeah, we've definitely spoken about those many times on the show and you can get really affordable ones from eight or fruit these days that have got Laura or White or Bluetooth or some kind of radio that you can easily update on mass.
So yeah, I'm still waiting for--
I've just seen that there's a new crown supply project which is kind of...
a similar kind of Pokemon style, or I've time I've got you style display, just gone crowd funding today, which is an air quality monitor which looks super fun, and again I think, and then there's the poem one, the little, the one by Matt Webb that's due to arrive at some point this year.
So there's a ton of things that are in this space, but I find it interesting that the ways in which people are applying.
Giving the limitations of the of the E-ing displays and finding ways to incorporate them into this slow computing or calm computing genre really.
The the the color ones are getting better too because I know the first and second gen ones were really bleached out looking
And as they can get better and more vibrant that'll really make in a big impact on things like comic books
and displaced in stores too.
So Andy, when you looked at your window earlier today,
did you notice any blocky kind of shapes,
perhaps of the clouds or buildings or anything like that?
No, I can only assume that the Minecraft mapping of the UK has not yet reached my London suburb because although it looks from the video that on the BBC here that we've got the central London appears to be quite well covered and done to some level of detail and potentially accuracy, I haven't dived into the actual model in too much depth.
I suspect that depending on the angles you get a beautifully detailed looking view or then if you swing around behind the building.
There's nothing there as you have in many games.
But yeah, this project is incredibly ambitious.
They claim that they want to create the whole of the UK in Minecraft.
And that's obviously not a small area.
You know, this was amazing.
The video was just fantastic.
And they do go into some of the buildings,
but as you say, I'm sure there are plenty of buildings that they don't go into.
So this is definitely a multiplayer environment.
But if we were to kind of get ourselves down to a single player environment,
that folks are telling us that they would love to have multiplayer.
So we have one example of a person, the developer who says to that, no, very loud.
So this is not one that I'm personally familiar with, but I think you guys both are, right?
The MMO Aaron Shore, which has been getting more and more attention on steam here.
In the last days, what's, have either of you played it before?
Is this something that you see as a crucial thing?
Well, it just came early accent access on April 14th, I believe, and it does look, no, launching early access April 14th, 2025, at least, that's what that article is.
Since 2023.
a Steam Superstar since 2023.
Hmm, either way, no, it does look fascinating to me, though, because I'm actually
playing one MMO right now that is the Lord of the Rings minds of Moria King, and it is a MMO that you can play as a single player and never connect to a server, so you have the full environment and do all the questing and everything, or you can do server-based and connect up with teams and do a true MMO, but totally different mindset.
is basically a design of an
m o were all the aspects are handled by the computer except for you as a player and the the npc's and I think you're describing before we started the npc's are A. I driven so they can learn and grow just as well as the player can and level up and have experience and and you're constantly interacting with that whole fully immersive world that's many many other players but all the other players are just
just the computer and this this seems fascinating to me.
Yeah, I think it's interesting because back in the day when you have the NPCs, they would be on their little loops and they'd have their fixed range of things they could say.
So, I think one of the things that an LLM concept can bring is, you know, a variety from that perspective.
I think the idea of this being that it's kind of like an MMO, but you don't have to connect and go online and actually meet people who will be annoying.
and miss bye.
and just want to troll other players is quite nice and quite also quite calming. I know that as I get older I have more, sometimes especially in gaming I have more anxiety about joining online games because I either think that I'm going to get creamed by youngsters who are much better at the games than I am because their reactions or otherwise, but also just cringing at their behaviours of some of the
the folks online. So I think that that's a nice element to it. I think now the interesting thing is that he's the author has been is being pushed to actually add or multi player to this and is saying no, I'm not going to not going to do it. Kind of that.
Yeah, this is confusing and my client, I'm seeing because we got multiple articles on this,
one of them was added shortly before the show. The original article says Early Access April 14th,
but the other article does say it's been around since 2023, so what is it? And then the link to the the store link gives me a 404. So very interesting. I wonder if it's geo locked to
Yeah. Weird.
a specific geography or something. I'll have to look it up on Steam.
Maybe so
All right, well, let's let's go to something that's a little bit more tangible and physical and that is
We've been chatting recently here about the Game Boy from Nintendo and we've got a couple of Nintendo story So one of the one of them is a port of
Windows onto a Game Boy so that you can have the experience of playing mind-sweeper on a Game Boy package
Make your Game Boy cooler to use. I don't know if that's exactly the way I would describe it, but okay.
I think this is awesome. I love it. I think it's a really fun idea of mashing up these things, but I don't think, I think again it's kind of fake, doesn't it? It's, it's not actually Windows. I think it's, as it says, it's a software package of sorts that contains a recreation of bits of Windows, rather than actually being like a port of Windows because they're using this tool called GBStudio which is very modern compared
to the Big Game Boy which essentially lets you now create and package Game Boy games very very straightforwardly. I love the idea, I love people's nostalgia for these kind of things and they're mashing together these retro operating system and a retro hand held. Yes. Absolutely.
I love the physical packaging too. I think that's a big ad right there that it comes as a cartridge,
right? So it's not a downloadable thing. It is a cartridge and then you're going to use the cartridge to execute this.
Yeah, I think that's really fun.
Yeah, I did find that that was the interesting part to me was the the cartridge aspect that was cool
Well, now staying with Nintendo for a little bit longer,
we've got this post from Alex Haydock,
and I'd spend a little time on this myself about a blog that is hosted on a Wii.
Yes.
So if you've got a Wii line around, you can repurpose it,
and you can follow this blog that is on a Wii,
that's telling you how to take your Wii,
and host into a web server that you can then have a blog
I love the fact, partly that this was something that came from electromagnetic field last year,
because this was a bit of hardware that they picked up in the swap shop that we run at,
they run at electromagnetic field, kind of had this thing planning to crack it and run homebrew stuff on it, and then he decided, "Ah, you know, let's try running,
try using it as a web server using NetBSD," which is, and the fact that the NetBSD port for the years is maintained and kept up to date.
There's most recently compiled in December last year, I find that amusing, the fact that he's done a bit of research into how well it stands up, it's a very, very basic web page, it's not running a ton of stuff, but he's sharing every 15 minutes, he's got a text file that gets dumped which has the performance of the machine available.
And it did get to number one on how I can use this week, that's not how I saw it, interestingly, I saw it because it was tagged with the MF card.
It's been all over the tech blogs this week, so curious to know how it actually behaved in practice when those spikes of excitement happen.
Yeah, I was wondering, he talks in his article about, you know, worrying about the amount of horsepower it had to be able to run and given it's a static web page, I figured it probably could handle pretty good throughput of people hitting it.
The bigger issue would be, you know, can the server handle that many people hitting it's still maiming. (laughs)
Yeah, and it's been up for four days. That's a little bit shorter than the last time when I looked at it's uptime I think it was up for a week the last time I looked at it, but it's there. It's cranking along
But by the way, I did just confirm the name of the device I was talking about earlier was the remarkable two, the pen-based device.
Yes, yes, yes
Yeah, consider getting that for one of my kids and they're like, yeah, no, thanks. I've worked we're good with paper. Thank you dad. So no
I would expect nothing less.
I know you still have a notebook next to you most of the days.
I do. I've been through probably about three in the last six months, at least.
All right. Well, guys, that gets to about time here. So we've been able to cover quite the wide variety of topics. We've been in Minecraft. We've been in virtual worlds. We've had some Nintendo elements. We've talked a little bit about algorithms and horror rings and watches and the like. So we hope that you've enjoyed this episode of games at work dot biz and for
those new to the podcast that I mentioned this to yesterday. Welcome. We're glad you're here.
You can drop us a line at gamesitwork.biz or find us on a variety of social networks and give us your insights about what you're seeing, what you think is interesting, and we would love to talk about it here next time and next week on gamesitwork.biz. See everybody.
Yep, see you in two weeks. Bye.
See ya.
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