e526 — Beans and Bricks

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photo of a can of black beans resting on top of two red clay bricks — Photo by Michael Martine, Chapel Hill, NC August 2025

Published 25 August 2025

e526 with Andy and Michael M – stories about focus – finding things that are missing, reducing distractions with apps like Focus Friend and Brick, viewing photo collections and a whole lot more.

Andy and Michael M get things rolling while Michael R is away, starting with an update from Andy’s recent presentation at FrOSCon 2025. Then the pair focus on an always on AI smart glasses concept, replete with all of the privacy and security considerations. Next up is an AI powered image search that resulted in the discovery of a long missing hiker. This reminded Michael of crowdsourced image searches powered by humans for search and rescue, and found the story of Jim Gray which was part of e44 back in 2013. Next in view is Vivo’s announcement of their mixed reality headset, followed quickly by a Vison Pro photo viewing app called PhotoDome.

Continuing on the concept of focus, Andy and Michael take a look at the Focus Friend app, which has a friendly bean shaped avatar that knits and unlocks prizes while the user remains focused on their task, and gets sad when interrupted. This reminded Andy of the Brick app, which he learned about from the hiro.report. The Brick app and physical tile creates the necessary friction to have the user bring the phone close to the Brick tile to “unbrick” the phone. The lengths required to create such friction to improve productivity spark a further discussion on the challenges that immersive software create for person to person connections and the increase in loneliness.

The team wraps up this episode with a callback to 2023 for software restricted Polish train repairs and software enabled subscriptions to increase automotive performance.

What apps, systems or techniques have you used for creating focus? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @[email protected] (our home for now) and let us know!

Selected Links

FrOSCon 2025

media.ccc.de Decentralising Freedom: Open Source for Sovereignty

AI

TechCrunch article: Harvard dropouts to launch ‘always on’ AI smart glasses that listen and record every conversation

Wired article: A Hiker Was Missing for Nearly a Year. Then an AI System Spotted His Helmet

Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences UC Berkley technical report UCB/EECS-2010-142 : Searching for Jim Gray: A Technical Overview

Games at Work e49: Crowdsourcing & Crowdfunding

AR / VR

9 to 5 Mac article: Vivo’s Vision Pro clone costs $1,400 and weighs 398g

Vivo press release: vivo Unveils First Mixed Reality Headset and New Imaging Strategy at 30th Anniversary

PhotoDome on Apple Vision Pro is a delightful way to revisit photos and albums. Combining XR concepts and interfaces with the rest of my computing life is why I'm so excited about visionOS. The developer of this app did an amazing job
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photodome/id6748567431
— Joseph Simpson (@[email protected])
2025-08-22T11:50:24.588Z

PhotoDome

Focus: Beans and Bricks

Tedium post: Me And The Bean

Focus Friend by Hank Green

IMDb: Mr. Bean

Brick

hiro.report

BBC Research and Development feature: Where is the social internet taking us?

Repairs and Upgrades

TechDirt article: Train Maker Sues Hackers For Exposing Dodgy Efforts To Make Train Repairs More Difficult

Games at Work e444: Glitch in the Matrix

BBC article: VW introduces monthly subscription to increase car power

Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own.

Michael Martine

110 episodes

#Tech #Lifestyle #Tech News #Games and Gambling #Michael Rowe, Michael Martine #Michael Rowe #News #Michael Martin