e574 with Andy and Michael M: from the Aina smart ring to the One ring, MCP architecture, Jellyfish Skills and a whole lot more!
Andy and Michael start things off with the Aina smart ring and end with the One ring with some intriguing stories in between. The newly announced Aina ring relieves the user of the burden of opening up their phone to approve agentic actions through a combination of screen notifications, voice commands and an integrated joystick in the ring. It seems that this may be a temporal / temporary benefit, while humans get used to agents acting on their behalf more and more.
Next up is an intriguing build your own Apple Vision Pro experience using older iPhone hardware and iOS capabilities such as AR Kit along with a 3D printed housing to hold the phone and cameras to your face. This is reminiscent of the Google Cardboard setup, and the capabilities of the hardware and software is now such that Brenpoly could make a phone accomplish a great deal. Michael noted that if you use mobile spotlight in iOS 27.2 to search on “Find”, iOS will return several cool features of Magnifier to identify objects around you.
Sticking with the hacking and temporal themes, there is a superb story of perseverance of a 2014 Renault Latitude owner named Rasmus Moorats wishing to change the car’s clock to wintertime, and the steps he took to accomplish this task. Check out the detailed blog post below and you too will marvel at what he did.
Switching gears to agentic software architecture, Michael and Andy take a look at an agenticthinking.ai post about the headless design pattern enabled by MCP. This spurs a discussion on Service Oriented Architecture, BPEL, WSDL and Enterprise Service Busses. The MCP integration point can enable any “head” to call upon the services – whether though a chat experience with Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT, through a bespoke application or partner applications, allowing for maximum flexibility and personalization for the user. Michael also notes that this is an enabling function for what he has called #JellyfishSkills – which allows an individual to see connections between disparate functionality and go deep by calling the services exposed by the MCP in a just in time manner.
Andy and Michael wrap up the episode with the exciting trailer for the next installment of The Rings of Power – which is set to release on 11 November 2026 – that’s this week!
What is an example of your persistence to achieve a technical outcome? What did you do, and why did you do it that way? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!
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Selected Links
Mobile Computing
TechCrunch article: Aina’s smart ring has a screen, a joystick, and a mic so you can talk to AI agents
hackster.io article: Can $5 Get You an Apple Vision Pro Alternative?
Apple iPhone User Guide: Detect doors, people, and furniture around you using Magnifier on iPhone
Rasmus Moorats blog.nns.ee blog post: Jailbreaking my car’s navigation system just so I can change the time
The Verge article: The Xbox Nano has a hidden cloud secret
Games at Work e386: Too Many Brits (for discussion on the shut down of Stadia)
Architectural Thinking
agenticthinking.ai blog post: Headless AI: Every App is a Head
Wikipedia article: Service-oriented architecture (SOA)
w3.org Web Services Description Language (WSDL)
Wikipedia article: Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
LinkedIn blog post by Michael M: #JellyfishSkills
Completing the Ring cycle
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