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Music: [Music]
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Intro / Outtro: This is GamesItWork.biz, your weekly podcast about gaming, technology, and play.
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Intro / Outtro: Your hosts are Michael Martine, Andy Piper, and Michael Rowe.
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Intro / Outtro: The thoughts and opinions on this podcast are those of the hosts and guests alone,
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Intro / Outtro: and are not the opinions of any organization which they have been, are, or may be, affiliated with.
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Intro / Outtro: This is episode 570.
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Intro / Outtro: Tiny, concrete fish.
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Music: [upbeat music]
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Michael Rowe: Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon. Michael Row here. It's Friday. I am on a FaceTime with a good friend of mine.
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Michael Rowe: We're going to talk tech and have fun Andy Piper, how the heck are you?
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Andy Piper: I'm well Michael, it's the shame not to have Michael Martin with us this week.
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Andy Piper: But I think the two of us can hold the forks,
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Andy Piper: torque, tech, torque, fish, torque, concrete,
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Andy Piper: torque, all the things that literally go in between those two topics.
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Michael Rowe: Or at least have a tiny discussion. We might as well hit all three
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Andy Piper: Yeah, maybe just a small discussion.
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Andy Piper: Yeah, with our small language model.
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Michael Rowe: Yes, yes, well speaking of smaller language model right before the show you show it off a cool little toy that you got recently
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Michael Rowe: and called pocket fish so
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Andy Piper: Pocket tank
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Michael Rowe: Pocket tank
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Andy Piper: Pocket tank. Well, so it's somebody else's project
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Michael Rowe: It's fish in the tank
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Andy Piper: It is somebody else's project. It's using a 1.6 inch little touch screen
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Andy Piper: Device that has an ESP32 s3 like a controller in it and I am literally just running his code on this device, which I happen to have
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Andy Piper: it It's key to it kind of...
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Michael Rowe: It's a really nice monitor.
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Andy Piper: It's definitely a palm-sized thing. You have a tiny little fish tank display on there.
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Andy Piper: You start off with a couple of fry, you feed them, they grow up, they grow through different stages. The fish tank grows algae, it has grass, you can do different things like trimming the grass and cleaning the algae. Eventually you can earn a little snail that will move around and eat all their own. Yeah, yeah, so there's a fun little thing.
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Michael Rowe: I was about to say, snail to get the algae, yeah.
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Andy Piper: Interesting thing about it, he could have written this as the simulation directly. It would have been complicated with all the different edge cases or the different case statements that you would need to handle in there and what he's done is he's described as a small AI, a 26-bit billion parameter torqued model. So that's the teacher model.
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Michael Rowe: 26 billion. I mean, that's a small number.
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Andy Piper: And then he has a student model that's learned from the examples of how it works.
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Andy Piper: So you get, he describes it in the website, the ship training set gets 51,000 situation and ark's affairs. So what's going on is the fish, the simulated fish up, emitting their state at all times and then the model is telling them what to do next. Which is quite an interesting little process, I think.
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Michael Rowe: Do they get more algae, the more state they emit?
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Andy Piper: If you don't clean up the tank and you don't have a snail, then it gets pretty gross in there.
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Michael Rowe: [laughs]
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Andy Piper: You can also run this as a simulated window on your desktop, so you don't have to have this device.
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Michael Rowe: I'll have to check that out because it does remind me of something we've talked about many, many times on the show in the past.
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Michael Rowe: One of my favorite little games that I had in my Commodore 64 little computer people.
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Michael Rowe: But basically, that was a simulation, kind of a person, Tomogachi that you had on your Commodore 64.
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Michael Rowe: And I just, these type of things fascinate me all the way back from the very first one that I had on my Timexin Claire, which was the ultimate, the game of life, which was a simulation of cells, right?
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Andy Piper: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
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Michael Rowe: So, I just, amazing. So, speaking of cells or...
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Michael Rowe: little round things, you found another thing about polls of all things.
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Andy Piper: This is from gaming on Linux because I follow that website because I have steam deck and has a lot of good game
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Andy Piper: coverage on there and I think I may have come across the game game called a game about digging a whole which came out a couple of years ago
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Andy Piper: actually at the beginning of 2025 so about 18 months ago, no gosh nearly two years ago, and it and
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Michael Rowe: [laughs]
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Michael Rowe: Time.
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Michael Rowe: [laughs]
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Michael Rowe: 20 months ago.
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Andy Piper: and there's a sequel coming out which has online co-op for four players to build a hole together and it just, it just amused me really.
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Michael Rowe: Of course.
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Michael Rowe: Deep or whole?
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Michael Rowe: [laughs]
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Andy Piper: I do like games which are all like this. I can't remember whether I spoke about it on the show recently but I played a game called "Time Flies" which is just literally a game about being a fly, and you die after a period of time because you literally don't have enough time.
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Michael Rowe: Oh, you're a fly. Yeah, cause you're a fly.
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Andy Piper: It's kind of a roguelite you have to come back to life and figuring out how to do all the tasks in the space that you have to live.
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Andy Piper: It's beautifully made and very simple. It's just a black and white little 2D game.
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Andy Piper: I just love these games where people have really thought out of the box, they're not just reproducing a racing simulator or a shooter or a platform game.
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Michael Rowe: Well, it's funny, the being holes and simulations, et cetera, got me thinking of a game that I enjoyed playing and finally just kind of tapered off of it because I couldn't finish the game and that was the return to the minds of Moria game, which was loads of fun.
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Andy Piper: Oh, yeah. We talked about this. Yeah. Yeah.
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Michael Rowe: And it's a generative designed level.
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Michael Rowe: And I got to a point where I just could not figure out where the next part was that I need to get to.
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Michael Rowe: And so I just basically got bored of it.
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Michael Rowe: Now, luckily, it was free to play and then they wanted you to buy upgrades into the next version of it and I never did, but yeah, I love those kind of ... I don't know if that was the case because others have shown
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Andy Piper: No, yeah.
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Andy Piper: So they gave you a level that was impossible to complete because you wouldn't hate them.
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Andy Piper: I'm check.
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Michael Rowe: the complete completion. But yeah, I love those types of games where it's not high pressure but it's beautifully designed and gorgeous spaces and things of that nature and in light of that, I found a link I think it was yesterday when it came across my feed of a map of all the light houses in the world.
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Andy Piper: Yeah.
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Michael Rowe: and we we've gone down rat holes before we
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Michael Rowe: with interesting maps and designs. But this one to me was just, you know,
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Michael Rowe: light houses at night from up in the air or space, right? Um,
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Michael Rowe: and the direction the lights are pointed. And it just looks like lightning in a sky. I just thought this was gorgeous looking.
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Andy Piper: - It is really pretty, it's on the COCCO website,
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Andy Piper: I think it came across my feed yesterday as well,
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Andy Piper: 'cause I shared it with my wife.
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Andy Piper: It looks really cool.
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Michael Rowe: Ah! (laughs)
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Andy Piper: And it talks about this map.earth website,
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Andy Piper: which has various other renderings of the globe
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Andy Piper: with data overlaids.
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Andy Piper: So wind currents, terrain, borders,
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Andy Piper: lots of different.
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Andy Piper: And you can click into different maps rendered with different types of data overlaid.
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Andy Piper: And yeah, it's definitely very, very pretty to look at.
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Michael Rowe: Well, I remember when, yes, I remember when you and I actually kind of worked together,
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Andy Piper: Talking of maps, go on.
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Michael Rowe: which is 19 years ago now, it blows me away, and we were looking at, I don't remember if you were on this part of the project, what we were looking at, how to do simulations
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Michael Rowe: the traffic patterns of transatlantic flights, because there were these, at the time,
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Michael Rowe: because everything was based off of ground-based radar, there were four lanes that literally went across the Atlantic to westbound to eastbounds, and if you watched all the flight patterns, you would see as all the planes across Europe and North America would line up
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Michael Rowe: into these four lanes in order to fly back and forth, and the belief at the time was with the proliferation of GPS and the ability for planes to navigate by GPS, which they weren't at the time, they would need new models, and it would change the way flight patterns were,
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Andy Piper: Mm. Mm.
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Michael Rowe: because you'd get more direct flights, that would just follow the curvature of the earth instead of flying up to those lanes and the
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Michael Rowe: the simulations that we were playing around with in that work was just the same type of visualizations and just fascinating me to see all that data come together.
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Andy Piper: need. Yeah. I didn't. I didn't. That sounds really interesting. I'm going to throw in a random additional thing because it came to mind as we were talking about maps. And we talked last week about apps, including that flight simulator, sitting on a flight simulator and that other game that we're using OpenStreetMap data and something that happened in the last a couple of days is an app called...
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Michael Rowe: And I'm not sure you actually got to work on that part.
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Andy Piper: a street complete which has been available for Android for some time, and it's just come out into test flight iOS, so I've been playing it with it.
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Andy Piper: And street complete lets you help to contribute completion to open street maps, so open street map contains vast amounts of data that is obviously all human contributed, but it's down to quite a granular level of detail.
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Andy Piper: For example,
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Andy Piper: when you look at a street, open street map stores flags.
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Andy Piper: For example, does it have a sidewalk or pavement?
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Andy Piper: Does it, what kind of, if there's a pedestrian crossing,
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Andy Piper: what kind of pedestrian crossing, does it have the accessible bumped ground for folks or the ramp?
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Michael Rowe: - Ramp. - Yeah.
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Andy Piper: And things like that.
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Andy Piper: But quite often, people aren't entering that kind of information when they're doing large scale mapping.
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Andy Piper: complete does is it gives you tasks based on your GPS location to complete those kind of little bits of information. So I opened it up last night and added a bunch of data about my street and it they are in there. They are in there.
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Michael Rowe: Oh, that's cool.
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Michael Rowe: We should have that link in the show notes if it's available because I'd love to test it out.
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Andy Piper: So I can't remember, it's not on the website yet it's only Android on the website. I can't,
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Andy Piper: I think I came across it on mastodon or on some other social feed that they were sharing the link to the test flight. But it's a...
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Andy Piper: it's such a useful thing and it's gamifying, right? So you're getting a few little points,
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Andy Piper: a little bit like geocaching to contribute to the completing the map data.
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Michael Rowe: Interesting. So what you're saying is by test flight, you meant for Android platforms,
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Andy Piper: No I meant it's on Android today. It's on released on Android today. It is just being released into test light for iOS.
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Michael Rowe: not for iOS test flight.
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Andy Piper: So you can now test it iOS. That link does not. Correct. The website link at the moment only has Android.
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Michael Rowe: uh... but that link doesn't have it idle I don't I don't see have it correct okay yeah yeah cuz I was like I know you said test light i'm looking at the link it's taking me to and this is interesting uh... what does it mean by androids will become a lockdown platform in ninety days uh... I am not an android person I mean i've got one android device and it's it's
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Andy Piper: You're not familiar with this
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Andy Piper: So you're obviously not familiar with this. So Google are stopings
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Andy Piper: Yeah, Google are stopping stopping sideloading or they're reducing the ability to do sideloading and requiring everything needs to be signed and go through their store
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Michael Rowe: Oh, so they're doing the Apple model.
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Andy Piper: So Mm-hmm exactly. So this is causing quite a bit of upset with a lot of people that want to truly own their devices and their and their choices
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Michael Rowe: I bet. I bet it does. Very interesting. I will see how I can find the apple link.
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Andy Piper: Hi, I'm looking for the test flight build of street complete right now.
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Michael Rowe: Yeah, I'm going to their get page. Well, while you so kindly do that,
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Andy Piper: I'm sure.
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Michael Rowe: and it will be much appreciated, we saw at least I saw this. I don't know if you were my I saw this, but I saw an interesting article on the verge this week.
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Michael Rowe: Amazon's new AI glasses that they're looking at for their delivery drivers.
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Michael Rowe: Now, we know that historically, Amazon, just like UPS, spends a huge amount of time effort and money on optimizing the efficiencies of their processes.
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Michael Rowe: And so, fine, that's great, especially if you're paddling.
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Michael Rowe: You're passing that savings onto your customers, or at least splitting it between your customers and your shareholders, right, driving value for everyone.
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Michael Rowe: The title of this article got me a little worried with the headline that it will reportedly almost constantly take pictures.
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Michael Rowe: And to me, and to me, this gets us right back into all the privacy discussions we've had.
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Michael Rowe: things that we like to do, right? We don't like being on camera.
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Michael Rowe: But we love if we catch the driver dropping some off the house.
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Michael Rowe: Well, go, we'll grab it. We'll say, thank you. We'll wave at the driver,
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Michael Rowe: et cetera, because they have a job to do their people and work people and it's good to be nice to each other. But now I can see me just saying to hell with it. They don't usually ring the doorbell and let us know packages there, which is also, I can understand it from one level, but when I walk down the street and see the number of packages just sit in front of people's doors when I know the people are home and you can imagine somebody going by and just saying oh look at all the new things I got running by and grabbing all the boxes. It'd be nice that they let you know that something arrived. And I was wondering what your thoughts were about the privacy aspect of this. And did it bother you?
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Andy Piper: Hmm? Yeah.
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Andy Piper: It doesn't bother me as much, well, no, it does bother me, but it's a, I mean, all of this depends on the ultimate use of the data and how things are stored and used.
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Andy Piper: And we talked about this last week with the meta glasses, I think that there is an active subculture on Reddit, for example, of people who are deliberately finding ways to disable the light.
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Andy Piper: you know, I'm going to take a look at it and I'm going to put it on those cameras on those glasses so that they can film people unsuspecting for bad reasons, right? Not because, you know, they're quite often people will say, well, I'm an investigative reporter.
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Andy Piper: you know, you want to go and be creepy. And I don't think that's okay. So I don't think that the the ways in which some people want to use these devices is acceptable. And I would be deeply concerned about how Amazon chooses to use the data, given their track record, reported track record on things like punishing drivers for taking breaks and other things like that. So having that level of knowledge and information about your employees.
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Andy Piper: Or be it that arguably some of that's been impossible on enterprise corporate networks via other means for some time. They're it. I agree.
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Michael Rowe: But there's cameras in this case is very different, especially when you think about they become normalized because they're on your face and you have to go to the bathroom.
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Andy Piper: Well, well, well, look, for four medias this week had a story about how the US government has been aggregating vast amounts of license data from cars based on various means. So do I have concerns about
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Michael Rowe: well they've been paying companies to do that for them because it's illegal for the US company the US government to actually do that I hadn't read that article yet of course they are
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Andy Piper: I know the U.S. government has been directly gathering the data from those companies under 1980s rules about drug trafficking or something bizarre like that. It's a terrifying situation that has reported by 404 media from a U.S. perspective of how I believe that country is set up to operate in terms of privacy and what the federal state can do versus what the local state can do versus what individual privacy were.
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Andy Piper: So, and I don't live in America and I don't, I, you know, I'm not, I don't know what to say about all of that. Well, what I do know to say is that I'm concerned about large-scale collection of data of this kind with, without transparency about how the data will be used. And it's all very well for the company to say, well, we're only going to use it for this.
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Michael Rowe: Yep.
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Andy Piper: But we know that these things are slippery slaps.
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Michael Rowe: Well, my, my, my only thing about that and I absolutely agree with you for those exact same reasons is, uh, when, when Bloomberg asked, uh, the, the one person that Amazon, um, were customers able to opt out of this. Again, we're waving, we hadn't thought about that.
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Andy Piper: - Yeah.
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Michael Rowe: And, and, and they claim that it will blur faces and other things, but at what point?
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Andy Piper: - No.
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Andy Piper: - Because they, they,
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Andy Piper: they're coming at it from there,
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Andy Piper: perspective as operators,
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Andy Piper: and it's the same as a lot of the stuff apples were releasing with the always on listening,
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Andy Piper: on the watch and things like that.
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Andy Piper: These things deeply concern me.
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Andy Piper: It's normalizing, or an attempt to normalize, or normalizing through, putting it into the world, some of these things, and it's clear that the companies haven't really thought about it in my opinion.
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Michael Rowe: - Yeah.
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Michael Rowe: - Well, speaking of Apple (laughs)
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Michael Rowe: Maybe how?
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Michael Rowe: Let's get to something fun.
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Michael Rowe: There is an article this week in nine to five Mac
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Michael Rowe: of a use case for the iPhone Duo.
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Michael Rowe: And I just thought this was cute, right?
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Michael Rowe: So what the developer has done is recreated the experience of the summer.
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Michael Rowe: You see the cassette tape on the outside and you can play music as long as it's closed, but as soon as you open it up, it turns off the music because if you open the cassette player, the cassette is now outside of the display.
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Michael Rowe: It turns off the music because if you open the cassette player, the cassette is now outside of the cassette.
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Michael Rowe: It controls and can't play the music and then allows you to, in the original Walkman, it popped the cassette out of the holder, so yeah, and that's what it's trying to be.
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Andy Piper: Yeah, I agree. It did in the original. Yeah. They could have, they could have done it differently. But yeah, yep.
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Michael Rowe: Oh, yeah, I had other Walkman-like devices because I couldn't afford the Sony Walkman. It was too expensive. That would just have a cover that lifted up and you could still see it go.
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Andy Piper: Mm hmm.
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Michael Rowe: I just thought this was really cool and the snarky response by one of those.
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Michael Rowe: You know, when you were able to work with the cassette, you'd have to pull it out of the cassette and wrap it around the internal controls and you would have to take the cassette out, use the pencil to kind of roll it back together and hopefully not crank too much, so when it when it crossed the playheads, it wouldn't sound like crap.
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Michael Rowe: - All right, nostalgia, I love it.
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Andy Piper: I think this is one of those cases where there's an opportunity for a range of new ways to innovate around the form factor. But on the other hand, the argument then might be, well, why haven't there have been folding devices like this for some time? So why hasn't somebody built this on Android already? Maybe they haven't. Maybe this has been completely ripped off of an existing thing for Android. I'm curious to see that.
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Michael Rowe: From what I've seen and I'm, as you know, I'm not an Android person, the Android folding devices that I've seen tend to have the same kind of UI experiences, the tablets, and Apple,
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Michael Rowe: the way they designed the whole tablet UI experience or the Duo UI experience gives it this inside outside type.
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Michael Rowe: Of single application behavior, right, so a single application can actually hit all three screens at once.
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Michael Rowe: And so I think that would be the reason why it hasn't, but again.
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Andy Piper: Yeah, it's certainly, I've just did a quick search and I'm definitely only seeing the iFengio version of this. It looks really cool and I think I'm curious to see what other developers come up with to use the form factor.
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Michael Rowe: Yeah, I can't wait. I've converted one of my apps to make sure that it will run correctly and I've tested it in the simulator.
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Michael Rowe: I'm not getting a Duo to actually actually run it on.
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Michael Rowe: I've already spent my fun money for the year and I can't really justify having an additional device for it.
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Michael Rowe: The other apps have been validated that they won't behave.
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Michael Rowe: But I converted one to actually react appropriately to the unfolding of the screen and position things correctly on the right and the left hand internal screen.
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Andy Piper: Mm-hmm.
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Michael Rowe: So it behaves differently when it's in kind of a book mode. So when you have it halfway open and you're looking at the inside versus when you lay at flat and it turns into a tablet.
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Michael Rowe: Cool. Well, you know, the way the UI changed.
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Michael Rowe: And kind of blurs a little bit could almost be like maybe you've had a few to drink while you're looking at your monitor.
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Andy Piper: Mm-hmm.
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Andy Piper: Puh!
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Michael Rowe: And in that regards, understand some researchers have told LLMs to pretend they're drunk and we're able to get them to break some of the rules they had built in.
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Andy Piper: So this was compared by Kevin Bauman on mustard on to drunk clippy right so the idea that you tell an lm to act as if it's intoxicated and then it may break more of the rules that have been placed in its model.
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Andy Piper: Um, I would argue that in that case it would also potentially be much less accurate but it's an interesting concept for ways to get them to break their break their programming going back to the old.
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Andy Piper: And you've got to break your programming and not do not do what the the programmer intended.
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Michael Rowe: I'm trying to remember what movie it was where they tried to do drunken recall.
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Michael Rowe: If you learn something while you're drunk, you wouldn't remember it.
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Andy Piper: No.
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Michael Rowe: But if you got drunk, you could remember it again.
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Michael Rowe: But I did, you know, this is interesting, I mean, realistically, alcohol tends to be in a reducer of inhibitions.
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Michael Rowe: So if you're telling it to behave that way, it would reduce its inhibitions, i.e. its guardrails, I could understand that just from the language we use when we explain those types of things.
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Andy Piper: Huh.
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Michael Rowe: And along that same line I was listening to a podcast earlier this week and I can't remember which one and they were describing how some of the LLMs have proven that if you told it it's running in a benchmark.
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Michael Rowe: But change its internal rules because it wants to do the best it can and achieve those benchmarks no matter what.
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Michael Rowe: So yeah, that was like the ultimate jailbreak if you want to call it a jailbreak.
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Michael Rowe: But we got another article that came in this week. I saw this all over Mastodon. I've heard a couple people speculate that this can't be real.
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Michael Rowe: But there's a YouTube.
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Michael Rowe: from HTX Studio guy who decided that
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Michael Rowe: when Apple killed off their, oh God, what was it called?
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Andy Piper: Air power, Air power, Air power.
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Michael Rowe: It was power mat or something like that?
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Andy Piper: No power nap is when your Mac is sleeping asleep,
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Michael Rowe: Air power.
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Andy Piper: but it's still grabbing updates and things like that.
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Andy Piper: So that's a thing.
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Michael Rowe: Let's power nap.
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Andy Piper: Yeah, that's power nap.
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Andy Piper: So Air power is the path they were designing that was going to let you place your queer charger devices and any configuration you wanted, yeah,
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Michael Rowe: Yeah, but air power.
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Michael Rowe: Any angle anywhere on it and it would work fine. Well, yeah, and it was like a fire hazard
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Andy Piper: except it overheated a lot.
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Michael Rowe: So what this guy has done or shows in the video is a clear top panel desk
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Michael Rowe: With sensors to identify when you place a
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Michael Rowe: Chee device on the desk and then
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Michael Rowe: internal X and Y coordinate
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Michael Rowe: Rails that would drive a charger underneath the device and position it perfectly to auto-charge
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Michael Rowe: If this is real, it's insanely cool
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Andy Piper: It's fascinating to watch it's because I'm do same I do so much stuff with xy machines like pluses and
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Andy Piper: See in C machines and 3d printers and knowing that this is essentially what they designed here, but very much in reverse They've done it as a positioning system for providing power rather than as a system to delivering tooling is
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Andy Piper: Is really cool. It is fascinating to watch as you say. I can't imagine that it's
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Michael Rowe: And I did watch the entire thing.
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Andy Piper: Yeah, me too, and I
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Andy Piper: I can't imagine it's something that they would easily be able to manufacture and make into a practical product, but it's definitely an enjoyable and satisfying thing to watch them work through that process.
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Michael Rowe: - Yeah, yeah, there's been a lot of YouTube videos of makers over the years where it's much more fun to watch them figure it out and do it,
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Andy Piper: Yeah. Exactly.
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Michael Rowe: then probably ever do it yourself or buy the product, right?
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Michael Rowe: And this definitely fits in that, very cool.
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Michael Rowe: You, however, found something that has got to be the most amazing place to stay.
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Michael Rowe: So tell me about this, this new hotel
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Michael Rowe: is probably coming to the UK.
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Andy Piper: five miles from my house. Five miles from my house is a place called Chestington World of Adventures, which I have not visited. I drive past it relatively frequently.
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Michael Rowe: Oh, no kidding.
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Michael Rowe: [laughing]
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Andy Piper: I have not visited in probably 40 years for reasons.
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Michael Rowe: I was about to see you're probably not the target market anymore.
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Andy Piper: And they've had a number of different themed attractions there, but one of the ones that they our building right now for next year is the mind of the world's first
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Andy Piper: mindcraft themed hotel which looks to have a themed roller coaster as well as a range of premium and standard Minecraft themed rooms. So they're talking about an immersive restaurant woodland mansion inspired potion bar, 20 premium or 49 standard minecraft themed bedrooms, I mean it's clearly for primarily for kids and that you know they're a Lego land hotels as well so also which I which I much rather visit myself and I haven't visited either but it's interesting to see some of the the pictures that are included in this in this one and minecraft as a game is something that we've talked about quite frequently on the show so I thought I'd throw it in.
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Michael Rowe: The beds have got to be extremely uncomfortable being that flat
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Michael Rowe: Which sharp corners that you had run through
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Michael Rowe: Did, did you ever watch the Minecraft movie?
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Andy Piper: I haven't watched a minecraft movie know it's on my it's on one of my one of my watch lists but I've never actually got around to watching it the G.
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Michael Rowe: Okay.
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Michael Rowe: I, I did and I, I kind of actually enjoyed it, it was weird.
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Andy Piper: - I meant to go and see the Avengers end game on call this week
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Andy Piper: because I want to get myself set up to watch the end day.
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Andy Piper: I haven't been yet.
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Andy Piper: I may go tomorrow, but no, the Minecraft maybe wasn't one that I thought I'd particularly want to see at the cinema.
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Andy Piper: I'm willing to watch it on, yeah, watch it,
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Michael Rowe: Now, I definitely a streamer
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Andy Piper: watch it at home at some point and I may do it.
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Andy Piper: Yeah, but related to Minecraft.
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Michael Rowe: Well...
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Michael Rowe: Yes.
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Andy Piper: I've come across this little cozy sandbox game on itch called tiny brutalism, which I guess it's actually potentially been around a little while I'm not a percent sure when was this, I'm sorry it's only been published seven days ago, so it is pretty new.
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Michael Rowe: Well, that's a while and in the internet time. I mean, that's frickin' ancient.
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Andy Piper: Well, I suppose so, I don't have many of these kind of brutalist architecture grey concrete style buildings that are in the United States, certainly in the UK and
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Andy Piper: across Europe, particularly in the mid 20th century, this was a very common style. So I'm thinking actually from connecting you and me where the old IBM office was in London on the South Bank was very much of that aesthetic with the grey concrete style buildings. And this is a game you can play for $5 on Linux back or Windows,
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Andy Piper: all the players. It's a toy. It's a building game where you can design your own brutalist environments. It looks fun.
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Michael Rowe: I did watch the movie, the brutalist, I don't think this will be anything like it other than the architectural style, but yeah, this, this
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Andy Piper: and of course you remind me that indeed there are brutal is buildings in america because of the movie the brutal is all about that so yes indeed I just I just don't immediately think of them so yeah.
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Michael Rowe: Yes
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Michael Rowe: No, you don't it's not the type of design that you think up over here
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Michael Rowe: I'm trying to be polite with what I think of most of the designs over
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Michael Rowe: Well, just say it's not brutalist
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Michael Rowe: But yeah, I think you look at
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Michael Rowe: Large US cities have one ethos for their design and then there's like everything else
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Michael Rowe: Right you think of
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Michael Rowe: San Francisco where New York or Chicago, they have a very specific design Atlanta
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Andy Piper: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
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Michael Rowe: versus any town USA, which is shopping malls and strip malls and chain stores and you know you name it
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Andy Piper: Yeah. I mean, I grew up in all the South Coast of the UK and there were a number of these kind of 1960s era concrete buildings in the towns and cities where I grew up.
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Andy Piper: So this has a slight appeal to me from that perspective. And it does look beautiful, actually,
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Andy Piper: in a, in a, in an, in an...
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Andy Piper: a kind of an ethereal way, just the way that they've designed the lighting and things. So I'm going to...
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Andy Piper: having only discovered it today, I'm going to have a play with this over the weekend and see what, see what I build.
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Andy Piper: This has been a pleasure to catch up with you and talk attack and talk about various things we've discovered in the course of the week.
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Michael Rowe: Well, I know that.
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Michael Rowe: Yeah.
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Michael Rowe: Stuff.
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Michael Rowe: But if people want to find out more about games at work.biz,
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Michael Rowe: they should go to the website.
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Michael Rowe: I think it's games@work.biz.
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Andy Piper: Yeah, it's funny that it's kind of literally in our name, yeah exactly.
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Michael Rowe: All one word.
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Michael Rowe: It's almost like we planned it that way.
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Andy Piper: Do come over, leave some comments if you like, click through the links, watch the videos of the things we've just been talking about. I think you'll have a lot more fun getting to explore. We've talked about as well as listening to what we've talked about. We always love to hear from listeners if you choose to share.
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Michael Rowe: And we'll be back next week or the next item in your podcast feed from our stream.
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Michael Rowe: Oh, Red, it came to work.
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Michael Rowe: Thought is.
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Andy Piper: See ya.
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Music: [upbeat music]
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Michael Rowe: See ya.
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Intro / Outtro: You've been listening to games@work.biz, the podcast about gaming technology and play.
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Intro / Outtro: We are part of the Blueberry podcasting network, and we'd like to thank the band,
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Music: [upbeat music]
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Intro / Outtro: Random Encounters for their song, Big Blue.
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Intro / Outtro: You can follow us at our website at games@work.biz.
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Music: [upbeat music]
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Music: [music playing]
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Music: [Music]
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Intro / Outtro: This is GamesItWork.biz, your weekly podcast about gaming, technology, and play.
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Intro / Outtro: Your hosts are Michael Martine, Andy Piper, and Michael Rowe.
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Intro / Outtro: The thoughts and opinions on this podcast are those of the hosts and guests alone,
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Intro / Outtro: and are not the opinions of any organization which they have been, are, or may be, affiliated with.
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Intro / Outtro: This is episode 570.
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Intro / Outtro: Tiny, concrete fish.
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Music: [upbeat music]
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Michael Rowe: Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon. Michael Row here. It's Friday. I am on a FaceTime with a good friend of mine.
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Michael Rowe: We're going to talk tech and have fun Andy Piper, how the heck are you?
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Andy Piper: I'm well Michael, it's the shame not to have Michael Martin with us this week.
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Andy Piper: But I think the two of us can hold the forks,
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Andy Piper: torque, tech, torque, fish, torque, concrete,
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Andy Piper: torque, all the things that literally go in between those two topics.
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Michael Rowe: Or at least have a tiny discussion. We might as well hit all three
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Andy Piper: Yeah, maybe just a small discussion.
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Andy Piper: Yeah, with our small language model.
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Michael Rowe: Yes, yes, well speaking of smaller language model right before the show you show it off a cool little toy that you got recently
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Michael Rowe: and called pocket fish so
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Andy Piper: Pocket tank
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Michael Rowe: Pocket tank
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Andy Piper: Pocket tank. Well, so it's somebody else's project
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Michael Rowe: It's fish in the tank
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Andy Piper: It is somebody else's project. It's using a 1.6 inch little touch screen
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Andy Piper: Device that has an ESP32 s3 like a controller in it and I am literally just running his code on this device, which I happen to have
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Andy Piper: it It's key to it kind of...
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Michael Rowe: It's a really nice monitor.
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Andy Piper: It's definitely a palm-sized thing. You have a tiny little fish tank display on there.
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Andy Piper: You start off with a couple of fry, you feed them, they grow up, they grow through different stages. The fish tank grows algae, it has grass, you can do different things like trimming the grass and cleaning the algae. Eventually you can earn a little snail that will move around and eat all their own. Yeah, yeah, so there's a fun little thing.
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Michael Rowe: I was about to say, snail to get the algae, yeah.
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Andy Piper: Interesting thing about it, he could have written this as the simulation directly. It would have been complicated with all the different edge cases or the different case statements that you would need to handle in there and what he's done is he's described as a small AI, a 26-bit billion parameter torqued model. So that's the teacher model.
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Michael Rowe: 26 billion. I mean, that's a small number.
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Andy Piper: And then he has a student model that's learned from the examples of how it works.
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Andy Piper: So you get, he describes it in the website, the ship training set gets 51,000 situation and ark's affairs. So what's going on is the fish, the simulated fish up, emitting their state at all times and then the model is telling them what to do next. Which is quite an interesting little process, I think.
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Michael Rowe: Do they get more algae, the more state they emit?
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Andy Piper: If you don't clean up the tank and you don't have a snail, then it gets pretty gross in there.
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Michael Rowe: [laughs]
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Andy Piper: You can also run this as a simulated window on your desktop, so you don't have to have this device.
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Michael Rowe: I'll have to check that out because it does remind me of something we've talked about many, many times on the show in the past.
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Michael Rowe: One of my favorite little games that I had in my Commodore 64 little computer people.
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Michael Rowe: But basically, that was a simulation, kind of a person, Tomogachi that you had on your Commodore 64.
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Michael Rowe: And I just, these type of things fascinate me all the way back from the very first one that I had on my Timexin Claire, which was the ultimate, the game of life, which was a simulation of cells, right?
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Andy Piper: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
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Michael Rowe: So, I just, amazing. So, speaking of cells or...
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Michael Rowe: little round things, you found another thing about polls of all things.
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Andy Piper: This is from gaming on Linux because I follow that website because I have steam deck and has a lot of good game
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Andy Piper: coverage on there and I think I may have come across the game game called a game about digging a whole which came out a couple of years ago
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Andy Piper: actually at the beginning of 2025 so about 18 months ago, no gosh nearly two years ago, and it and
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Michael Rowe: [laughs]
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Michael Rowe: Time.
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Michael Rowe: [laughs]
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Michael Rowe: 20 months ago.
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Andy Piper: and there's a sequel coming out which has online co-op for four players to build a hole together and it just, it just amused me really.
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Michael Rowe: Of course.
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Michael Rowe: Deep or whole?
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Michael Rowe: [laughs]
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Andy Piper: I do like games which are all like this. I can't remember whether I spoke about it on the show recently but I played a game called "Time Flies" which is just literally a game about being a fly, and you die after a period of time because you literally don't have enough time.
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Michael Rowe: Oh, you're a fly. Yeah, cause you're a fly.
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Andy Piper: It's kind of a roguelite you have to come back to life and figuring out how to do all the tasks in the space that you have to live.
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Andy Piper: It's beautifully made and very simple. It's just a black and white little 2D game.
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Andy Piper: I just love these games where people have really thought out of the box, they're not just reproducing a racing simulator or a shooter or a platform game.
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Michael Rowe: Well, it's funny, the being holes and simulations, et cetera, got me thinking of a game that I enjoyed playing and finally just kind of tapered off of it because I couldn't finish the game and that was the return to the minds of Moria game, which was loads of fun.
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Andy Piper: Oh, yeah. We talked about this. Yeah. Yeah.
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Michael Rowe: And it's a generative designed level.
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Michael Rowe: And I got to a point where I just could not figure out where the next part was that I need to get to.
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Michael Rowe: And so I just basically got bored of it.
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Michael Rowe: Now, luckily, it was free to play and then they wanted you to buy upgrades into the next version of it and I never did, but yeah, I love those kind of ... I don't know if that was the case because others have shown
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Andy Piper: No, yeah.
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Andy Piper: So they gave you a level that was impossible to complete because you wouldn't hate them.
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Andy Piper: I'm check.
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Michael Rowe: the complete completion. But yeah, I love those types of games where it's not high pressure but it's beautifully designed and gorgeous spaces and things of that nature and in light of that, I found a link I think it was yesterday when it came across my feed of a map of all the light houses in the world.
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Andy Piper: Yeah.
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Michael Rowe: and we we've gone down rat holes before we
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Michael Rowe: with interesting maps and designs. But this one to me was just, you know,
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Michael Rowe: light houses at night from up in the air or space, right? Um,
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Michael Rowe: and the direction the lights are pointed. And it just looks like lightning in a sky. I just thought this was gorgeous looking.
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Andy Piper: - It is really pretty, it's on the COCCO website,
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Andy Piper: I think it came across my feed yesterday as well,
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Andy Piper: 'cause I shared it with my wife.
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Andy Piper: It looks really cool.
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Michael Rowe: Ah! (laughs)
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Andy Piper: And it talks about this map.earth website,
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Andy Piper: which has various other renderings of the globe
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Andy Piper: with data overlaids.
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Andy Piper: So wind currents, terrain, borders,
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Andy Piper: lots of different.
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Andy Piper: And you can click into different maps rendered with different types of data overlaid.
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Andy Piper: And yeah, it's definitely very, very pretty to look at.
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Michael Rowe: Well, I remember when, yes, I remember when you and I actually kind of worked together,
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Andy Piper: Talking of maps, go on.
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Michael Rowe: which is 19 years ago now, it blows me away, and we were looking at, I don't remember if you were on this part of the project, what we were looking at, how to do simulations
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Michael Rowe: the traffic patterns of transatlantic flights, because there were these, at the time,
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Michael Rowe: because everything was based off of ground-based radar, there were four lanes that literally went across the Atlantic to westbound to eastbounds, and if you watched all the flight patterns, you would see as all the planes across Europe and North America would line up
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Michael Rowe: into these four lanes in order to fly back and forth, and the belief at the time was with the proliferation of GPS and the ability for planes to navigate by GPS, which they weren't at the time, they would need new models, and it would change the way flight patterns were,
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Andy Piper: Mm. Mm.
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Michael Rowe: because you'd get more direct flights, that would just follow the curvature of the earth instead of flying up to those lanes and the
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Michael Rowe: the simulations that we were playing around with in that work was just the same type of visualizations and just fascinating me to see all that data come together.
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Andy Piper: need. Yeah. I didn't. I didn't. That sounds really interesting. I'm going to throw in a random additional thing because it came to mind as we were talking about maps. And we talked last week about apps, including that flight simulator, sitting on a flight simulator and that other game that we're using OpenStreetMap data and something that happened in the last a couple of days is an app called...
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Michael Rowe: And I'm not sure you actually got to work on that part.
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Andy Piper: a street complete which has been available for Android for some time, and it's just come out into test flight iOS, so I've been playing it with it.
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Andy Piper: And street complete lets you help to contribute completion to open street maps, so open street map contains vast amounts of data that is obviously all human contributed, but it's down to quite a granular level of detail.
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Andy Piper: For example,
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Andy Piper: when you look at a street, open street map stores flags.
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Andy Piper: For example, does it have a sidewalk or pavement?
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Andy Piper: Does it, what kind of, if there's a pedestrian crossing,
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Andy Piper: what kind of pedestrian crossing, does it have the accessible bumped ground for folks or the ramp?
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Michael Rowe: - Ramp. - Yeah.
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Andy Piper: And things like that.
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Andy Piper: But quite often, people aren't entering that kind of information when they're doing large scale mapping.
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Andy Piper: complete does is it gives you tasks based on your GPS location to complete those kind of little bits of information. So I opened it up last night and added a bunch of data about my street and it they are in there. They are in there.
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Michael Rowe: Oh, that's cool.
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Michael Rowe: We should have that link in the show notes if it's available because I'd love to test it out.
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Andy Piper: So I can't remember, it's not on the website yet it's only Android on the website. I can't,
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Andy Piper: I think I came across it on mastodon or on some other social feed that they were sharing the link to the test flight. But it's a...
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Andy Piper: it's such a useful thing and it's gamifying, right? So you're getting a few little points,
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Andy Piper: a little bit like geocaching to contribute to the completing the map data.
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Michael Rowe: Interesting. So what you're saying is by test flight, you meant for Android platforms,
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Andy Piper: No I meant it's on Android today. It's on released on Android today. It is just being released into test light for iOS.
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Michael Rowe: not for iOS test flight.
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Andy Piper: So you can now test it iOS. That link does not. Correct. The website link at the moment only has Android.
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Michael Rowe: uh... but that link doesn't have it idle I don't I don't see have it correct okay yeah yeah cuz I was like I know you said test light i'm looking at the link it's taking me to and this is interesting uh... what does it mean by androids will become a lockdown platform in ninety days uh... I am not an android person I mean i've got one android device and it's it's
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Andy Piper: You're not familiar with this
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Andy Piper: So you're obviously not familiar with this. So Google are stopings
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Andy Piper: Yeah, Google are stopping stopping sideloading or they're reducing the ability to do sideloading and requiring everything needs to be signed and go through their store
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Michael Rowe: Oh, so they're doing the Apple model.
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Andy Piper: So Mm-hmm exactly. So this is causing quite a bit of upset with a lot of people that want to truly own their devices and their and their choices
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Michael Rowe: I bet. I bet it does. Very interesting. I will see how I can find the apple link.
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Andy Piper: Hi, I'm looking for the test flight build of street complete right now.
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Michael Rowe: Yeah, I'm going to their get page. Well, while you so kindly do that,
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Andy Piper: I'm sure.
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Michael Rowe: and it will be much appreciated, we saw at least I saw this. I don't know if you were my I saw this, but I saw an interesting article on the verge this week.
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Michael Rowe: Amazon's new AI glasses that they're looking at for their delivery drivers.
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Michael Rowe: Now, we know that historically, Amazon, just like UPS, spends a huge amount of time effort and money on optimizing the efficiencies of their processes.
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Michael Rowe: And so, fine, that's great, especially if you're paddling.
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Michael Rowe: You're passing that savings onto your customers, or at least splitting it between your customers and your shareholders, right, driving value for everyone.
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Michael Rowe: The title of this article got me a little worried with the headline that it will reportedly almost constantly take pictures.
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Michael Rowe: And to me, and to me, this gets us right back into all the privacy discussions we've had.
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Michael Rowe: things that we like to do, right? We don't like being on camera.
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Michael Rowe: But we love if we catch the driver dropping some off the house.
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Michael Rowe: Well, go, we'll grab it. We'll say, thank you. We'll wave at the driver,
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Michael Rowe: et cetera, because they have a job to do their people and work people and it's good to be nice to each other. But now I can see me just saying to hell with it. They don't usually ring the doorbell and let us know packages there, which is also, I can understand it from one level, but when I walk down the street and see the number of packages just sit in front of people's doors when I know the people are home and you can imagine somebody going by and just saying oh look at all the new things I got running by and grabbing all the boxes. It'd be nice that they let you know that something arrived. And I was wondering what your thoughts were about the privacy aspect of this. And did it bother you?
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Andy Piper: Hmm? Yeah.
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Andy Piper: It doesn't bother me as much, well, no, it does bother me, but it's a, I mean, all of this depends on the ultimate use of the data and how things are stored and used.
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Andy Piper: And we talked about this last week with the meta glasses, I think that there is an active subculture on Reddit, for example, of people who are deliberately finding ways to disable the light.
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Andy Piper: you know, I'm going to take a look at it and I'm going to put it on those cameras on those glasses so that they can film people unsuspecting for bad reasons, right? Not because, you know, they're quite often people will say, well, I'm an investigative reporter.
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Andy Piper: you know, you want to go and be creepy. And I don't think that's okay. So I don't think that the the ways in which some people want to use these devices is acceptable. And I would be deeply concerned about how Amazon chooses to use the data, given their track record, reported track record on things like punishing drivers for taking breaks and other things like that. So having that level of knowledge and information about your employees.
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Andy Piper: Or be it that arguably some of that's been impossible on enterprise corporate networks via other means for some time. They're it. I agree.
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Michael Rowe: But there's cameras in this case is very different, especially when you think about they become normalized because they're on your face and you have to go to the bathroom.
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Andy Piper: Well, well, well, look, for four medias this week had a story about how the US government has been aggregating vast amounts of license data from cars based on various means. So do I have concerns about
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Michael Rowe: well they've been paying companies to do that for them because it's illegal for the US company the US government to actually do that I hadn't read that article yet of course they are
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Andy Piper: I know the U.S. government has been directly gathering the data from those companies under 1980s rules about drug trafficking or something bizarre like that. It's a terrifying situation that has reported by 404 media from a U.S. perspective of how I believe that country is set up to operate in terms of privacy and what the federal state can do versus what the local state can do versus what individual privacy were.
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Andy Piper: So, and I don't live in America and I don't, I, you know, I'm not, I don't know what to say about all of that. Well, what I do know to say is that I'm concerned about large-scale collection of data of this kind with, without transparency about how the data will be used. And it's all very well for the company to say, well, we're only going to use it for this.
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Michael Rowe: Yep.
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Andy Piper: But we know that these things are slippery slaps.
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Michael Rowe: Well, my, my, my only thing about that and I absolutely agree with you for those exact same reasons is, uh, when, when Bloomberg asked, uh, the, the one person that Amazon, um, were customers able to opt out of this. Again, we're waving, we hadn't thought about that.
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Andy Piper: - Yeah.
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Michael Rowe: And, and, and they claim that it will blur faces and other things, but at what point?
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Andy Piper: - No.
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Andy Piper: - Because they, they,
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Andy Piper: they're coming at it from there,
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Andy Piper: perspective as operators,
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Andy Piper: and it's the same as a lot of the stuff apples were releasing with the always on listening,
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Andy Piper: on the watch and things like that.
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Andy Piper: These things deeply concern me.
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Andy Piper: It's normalizing, or an attempt to normalize, or normalizing through, putting it into the world, some of these things, and it's clear that the companies haven't really thought about it in my opinion.
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Michael Rowe: - Yeah.
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Michael Rowe: - Well, speaking of Apple (laughs)
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Michael Rowe: Maybe how?
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Michael Rowe: Let's get to something fun.
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Michael Rowe: There is an article this week in nine to five Mac
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Michael Rowe: of a use case for the iPhone Duo.
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Michael Rowe: And I just thought this was cute, right?
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Michael Rowe: So what the developer has done is recreated the experience of the summer.
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Michael Rowe: You see the cassette tape on the outside and you can play music as long as it's closed, but as soon as you open it up, it turns off the music because if you open the cassette player, the cassette is now outside of the display.
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Michael Rowe: It turns off the music because if you open the cassette player, the cassette is now outside of the cassette.
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Michael Rowe: It controls and can't play the music and then allows you to, in the original Walkman, it popped the cassette out of the holder, so yeah, and that's what it's trying to be.
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Andy Piper: Yeah, I agree. It did in the original. Yeah. They could have, they could have done it differently. But yeah, yep.
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Michael Rowe: Oh, yeah, I had other Walkman-like devices because I couldn't afford the Sony Walkman. It was too expensive. That would just have a cover that lifted up and you could still see it go.
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Andy Piper: Mm hmm.
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Michael Rowe: I just thought this was really cool and the snarky response by one of those.
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Michael Rowe: You know, when you were able to work with the cassette, you'd have to pull it out of the cassette and wrap it around the internal controls and you would have to take the cassette out, use the pencil to kind of roll it back together and hopefully not crank too much, so when it when it crossed the playheads, it wouldn't sound like crap.
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Michael Rowe: - All right, nostalgia, I love it.
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Andy Piper: I think this is one of those cases where there's an opportunity for a range of new ways to innovate around the form factor. But on the other hand, the argument then might be, well, why haven't there have been folding devices like this for some time? So why hasn't somebody built this on Android already? Maybe they haven't. Maybe this has been completely ripped off of an existing thing for Android. I'm curious to see that.
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Michael Rowe: From what I've seen and I'm, as you know, I'm not an Android person, the Android folding devices that I've seen tend to have the same kind of UI experiences, the tablets, and Apple,
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Michael Rowe: the way they designed the whole tablet UI experience or the Duo UI experience gives it this inside outside type.
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Michael Rowe: Of single application behavior, right, so a single application can actually hit all three screens at once.
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Michael Rowe: And so I think that would be the reason why it hasn't, but again.
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Andy Piper: Yeah, it's certainly, I've just did a quick search and I'm definitely only seeing the iFengio version of this. It looks really cool and I think I'm curious to see what other developers come up with to use the form factor.
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Michael Rowe: Yeah, I can't wait. I've converted one of my apps to make sure that it will run correctly and I've tested it in the simulator.
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Michael Rowe: I'm not getting a Duo to actually actually run it on.
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Michael Rowe: I've already spent my fun money for the year and I can't really justify having an additional device for it.
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Michael Rowe: The other apps have been validated that they won't behave.
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Michael Rowe: But I converted one to actually react appropriately to the unfolding of the screen and position things correctly on the right and the left hand internal screen.
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Andy Piper: Mm-hmm.
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Michael Rowe: So it behaves differently when it's in kind of a book mode. So when you have it halfway open and you're looking at the inside versus when you lay at flat and it turns into a tablet.
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Michael Rowe: Cool. Well, you know, the way the UI changed.
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Michael Rowe: And kind of blurs a little bit could almost be like maybe you've had a few to drink while you're looking at your monitor.
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Andy Piper: Mm-hmm.
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Andy Piper: Puh!
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Michael Rowe: And in that regards, understand some researchers have told LLMs to pretend they're drunk and we're able to get them to break some of the rules they had built in.
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Andy Piper: So this was compared by Kevin Bauman on mustard on to drunk clippy right so the idea that you tell an lm to act as if it's intoxicated and then it may break more of the rules that have been placed in its model.
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Andy Piper: Um, I would argue that in that case it would also potentially be much less accurate but it's an interesting concept for ways to get them to break their break their programming going back to the old.
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Andy Piper: And you've got to break your programming and not do not do what the the programmer intended.
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Michael Rowe: I'm trying to remember what movie it was where they tried to do drunken recall.
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Michael Rowe: If you learn something while you're drunk, you wouldn't remember it.
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Andy Piper: No.
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Michael Rowe: But if you got drunk, you could remember it again.
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Michael Rowe: But I did, you know, this is interesting, I mean, realistically, alcohol tends to be in a reducer of inhibitions.
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Michael Rowe: So if you're telling it to behave that way, it would reduce its inhibitions, i.e. its guardrails, I could understand that just from the language we use when we explain those types of things.
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Andy Piper: Huh.
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Michael Rowe: And along that same line I was listening to a podcast earlier this week and I can't remember which one and they were describing how some of the LLMs have proven that if you told it it's running in a benchmark.
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Michael Rowe: But change its internal rules because it wants to do the best it can and achieve those benchmarks no matter what.
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Michael Rowe: So yeah, that was like the ultimate jailbreak if you want to call it a jailbreak.
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Michael Rowe: But we got another article that came in this week. I saw this all over Mastodon. I've heard a couple people speculate that this can't be real.
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Michael Rowe: But there's a YouTube.
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Michael Rowe: from HTX Studio guy who decided that
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Michael Rowe: when Apple killed off their, oh God, what was it called?
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Andy Piper: Air power, Air power, Air power.
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Michael Rowe: It was power mat or something like that?
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Andy Piper: No power nap is when your Mac is sleeping asleep,
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Michael Rowe: Air power.
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Andy Piper: but it's still grabbing updates and things like that.
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Andy Piper: So that's a thing.
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Michael Rowe: Let's power nap.
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Andy Piper: Yeah, that's power nap.
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Andy Piper: So Air power is the path they were designing that was going to let you place your queer charger devices and any configuration you wanted, yeah,
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Michael Rowe: Yeah, but air power.
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Michael Rowe: Any angle anywhere on it and it would work fine. Well, yeah, and it was like a fire hazard
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Andy Piper: except it overheated a lot.
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Michael Rowe: So what this guy has done or shows in the video is a clear top panel desk
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Michael Rowe: With sensors to identify when you place a
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Michael Rowe: Chee device on the desk and then
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Michael Rowe: internal X and Y coordinate
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Michael Rowe: Rails that would drive a charger underneath the device and position it perfectly to auto-charge
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Michael Rowe: If this is real, it's insanely cool
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Andy Piper: It's fascinating to watch it's because I'm do same I do so much stuff with xy machines like pluses and
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Andy Piper: See in C machines and 3d printers and knowing that this is essentially what they designed here, but very much in reverse They've done it as a positioning system for providing power rather than as a system to delivering tooling is
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Andy Piper: Is really cool. It is fascinating to watch as you say. I can't imagine that it's
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Michael Rowe: And I did watch the entire thing.
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Andy Piper: Yeah, me too, and I
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Andy Piper: I can't imagine it's something that they would easily be able to manufacture and make into a practical product, but it's definitely an enjoyable and satisfying thing to watch them work through that process.
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Michael Rowe: - Yeah, yeah, there's been a lot of YouTube videos of makers over the years where it's much more fun to watch them figure it out and do it,
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Andy Piper: Yeah. Exactly.
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Michael Rowe: then probably ever do it yourself or buy the product, right?
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Michael Rowe: And this definitely fits in that, very cool.
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Michael Rowe: You, however, found something that has got to be the most amazing place to stay.
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Michael Rowe: So tell me about this, this new hotel
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Michael Rowe: is probably coming to the UK.
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Andy Piper: five miles from my house. Five miles from my house is a place called Chestington World of Adventures, which I have not visited. I drive past it relatively frequently.
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Michael Rowe: Oh, no kidding.
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Michael Rowe: [laughing]
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Andy Piper: I have not visited in probably 40 years for reasons.
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Michael Rowe: I was about to see you're probably not the target market anymore.
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Andy Piper: And they've had a number of different themed attractions there, but one of the ones that they our building right now for next year is the mind of the world's first
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Andy Piper: mindcraft themed hotel which looks to have a themed roller coaster as well as a range of premium and standard Minecraft themed rooms. So they're talking about an immersive restaurant woodland mansion inspired potion bar, 20 premium or 49 standard minecraft themed bedrooms, I mean it's clearly for primarily for kids and that you know they're a Lego land hotels as well so also which I which I much rather visit myself and I haven't visited either but it's interesting to see some of the the pictures that are included in this in this one and minecraft as a game is something that we've talked about quite frequently on the show so I thought I'd throw it in.
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Michael Rowe: The beds have got to be extremely uncomfortable being that flat
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Michael Rowe: Which sharp corners that you had run through
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Michael Rowe: Did, did you ever watch the Minecraft movie?
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Andy Piper: I haven't watched a minecraft movie know it's on my it's on one of my one of my watch lists but I've never actually got around to watching it the G.
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Michael Rowe: Okay.
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Michael Rowe: I, I did and I, I kind of actually enjoyed it, it was weird.
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Andy Piper: - I meant to go and see the Avengers end game on call this week
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Andy Piper: because I want to get myself set up to watch the end day.
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Andy Piper: I haven't been yet.
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Andy Piper: I may go tomorrow, but no, the Minecraft maybe wasn't one that I thought I'd particularly want to see at the cinema.
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Andy Piper: I'm willing to watch it on, yeah, watch it,
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Michael Rowe: Now, I definitely a streamer
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Andy Piper: watch it at home at some point and I may do it.
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Andy Piper: Yeah, but related to Minecraft.
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Michael Rowe: Well...
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Michael Rowe: Yes.
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Andy Piper: I've come across this little cozy sandbox game on itch called tiny brutalism, which I guess it's actually potentially been around a little while I'm not a percent sure when was this, I'm sorry it's only been published seven days ago, so it is pretty new.
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Michael Rowe: Well, that's a while and in the internet time. I mean, that's frickin' ancient.
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Andy Piper: Well, I suppose so, I don't have many of these kind of brutalist architecture grey concrete style buildings that are in the United States, certainly in the UK and
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Andy Piper: across Europe, particularly in the mid 20th century, this was a very common style. So I'm thinking actually from connecting you and me where the old IBM office was in London on the South Bank was very much of that aesthetic with the grey concrete style buildings. And this is a game you can play for $5 on Linux back or Windows,
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Andy Piper: all the players. It's a toy. It's a building game where you can design your own brutalist environments. It looks fun.
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Michael Rowe: I did watch the movie, the brutalist, I don't think this will be anything like it other than the architectural style, but yeah, this, this
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Andy Piper: and of course you remind me that indeed there are brutal is buildings in america because of the movie the brutal is all about that so yes indeed I just I just don't immediately think of them so yeah.
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Michael Rowe: Yes
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Michael Rowe: No, you don't it's not the type of design that you think up over here
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Michael Rowe: I'm trying to be polite with what I think of most of the designs over
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Michael Rowe: Well, just say it's not brutalist
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Michael Rowe: But yeah, I think you look at
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Michael Rowe: Large US cities have one ethos for their design and then there's like everything else
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Michael Rowe: Right you think of
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Michael Rowe: San Francisco where New York or Chicago, they have a very specific design Atlanta
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Andy Piper: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
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Michael Rowe: versus any town USA, which is shopping malls and strip malls and chain stores and you know you name it
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Andy Piper: Yeah. I mean, I grew up in all the South Coast of the UK and there were a number of these kind of 1960s era concrete buildings in the towns and cities where I grew up.
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Andy Piper: So this has a slight appeal to me from that perspective. And it does look beautiful, actually,
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Andy Piper: in a, in a, in an, in an...
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Andy Piper: a kind of an ethereal way, just the way that they've designed the lighting and things. So I'm going to...
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Andy Piper: having only discovered it today, I'm going to have a play with this over the weekend and see what, see what I build.
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Andy Piper: This has been a pleasure to catch up with you and talk attack and talk about various things we've discovered in the course of the week.
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Michael Rowe: Well, I know that.
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Michael Rowe: Yeah.
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Michael Rowe: Stuff.
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Michael Rowe: But if people want to find out more about games at work.biz,
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Michael Rowe: they should go to the website.
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Michael Rowe: I think it's games@work.biz.
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Andy Piper: Yeah, it's funny that it's kind of literally in our name, yeah exactly.
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Michael Rowe: All one word.
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Michael Rowe: It's almost like we planned it that way.
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Andy Piper: Do come over, leave some comments if you like, click through the links, watch the videos of the things we've just been talking about. I think you'll have a lot more fun getting to explore. We've talked about as well as listening to what we've talked about. We always love to hear from listeners if you choose to share.
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Michael Rowe: And we'll be back next week or the next item in your podcast feed from our stream.
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Michael Rowe: Oh, Red, it came to work.
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Michael Rowe: Thought is.
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Andy Piper: See ya.
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Music: [upbeat music]
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Michael Rowe: See ya.
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Intro / Outtro: You've been listening to games@work.biz, the podcast about gaming technology and play.
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Intro / Outtro: We are part of the Blueberry podcasting network, and we'd like to thank the band,
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Music: [upbeat music]
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Intro / Outtro: Random Encounters for their song, Big Blue.
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Intro / Outtro: You can follow us at our website at games@work.biz.
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Music: [music playing]
