Photo by Kris Mikael Krister on Unsplash

This week’s episode is chock full of robots, books, movies and non-fungible memories, slugs and tokens.   Michael and Michael start things off with a robotic roundup, first with Amazon’s reported Vesta.  Then, the team goes into more detail with the Anki robot, submarine robots and medical robots.  The co-hosts are reminded of the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage that blends submarines and medical robots.

Next, the team gets into a constructive conversation around 3D home printing.  And not printing at home, rather printing a home.  3D printing homes is becoming more feasible, and there are even communities of 3D printed homes being extruded in Texas and California.  There is even a show on AppleTV+ called Mexico that deals with this topic.

In the world of old(er) technology, Jorge Cohen has written a PalmOS app for Twitter, and Bob Wulff has ported the recent movie Tenet to Game Boy Advance cartridges. Talk about interesting media consumption patterns!  In other news, Apple’s HomePod is being discontinued in favor of the HomePod mini.

Turning then to NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, a funny tweet by Eric Brynjolfsson got Michael and Michael thinking about setting up an NFT opportunity of their own.  Check out the show, and if you would be interested in the Games at Work team offer, give them a shout on Twitter @gamesatwork_biz ! 

And in a science fiction imitates nature kind of story, check out how the sea slug manages to regenerate their entire body.  Amazing to think about what evolutionary advance caused this biological capability, and what it may mean for modern medicine.  Michael M can’t resist making a Star Trek Enterprise saucer separation analogy to this story.

Michael and Michael conclude this week’s episode with an interesting set of stories about Steve Jobs shared by the Computer History Museum in honor of what would have been his 66th birthday.  Have a look at the YouTube link below in the show notes.

Selected Links

Concert for Charlottesville — https://www.concertforcharlottesville.com/index.html 

Tucows — https://tucows.com 

The Verge article: Amazon’s secret home robot Vesta reportedly in ‘late-prototype stage’ of development — https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/10/22322813/amazon-home-robot-vesta-alexa-project-rumors-specs-report 

TechCrunch article: Eye, robot — https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/11/robotics-roundup-3/ 

Fantastic Voyage — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Voyage 

Digital Dream Labs — https://www.digitaldreamlabs.com 

The Verge article: These new 3D-printed homes in Austin are going for $450k — https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325004/new-3d-printed-homes-austin-price-icon-housing 

CNBC article: 3D-printed housing developments suddenly take off – here’s what they look like —