Photo by benjamin lehman on Unsplash
Published 21 July 2025
e521 with Andy, Michael and Michael – stories about expressive robots (Shoggoth Mini, Apple ELEGNT, SpiRob & facehugger), newly reengineered Commodore & Sinclair computer reboots, Seagate’s 30TB drives and a whole lot more.
Andy, Michael and Michael get things rolling with a story about what went into creating the hero image for last week’s show notes.  The team then turns to the Shoggoth Mini robot, and how it uses it’s antenna so expressively.  Inspired by Apple’s ELEGNT robot lamp, and SpiRobs’s tentacle system, Matthieu Le Cauchois started building the Shoggoth Mini.  Check out the links below for the videos and images to see how this robot interacts.  After touching on a robotic instance of a facehugger from the Aliens movies, the co hosts turn back to the future.
If you are nostalgic for a Commodore 64 computer, it is your lucky day.  Newly reengineered C-64s are available in several different models, and you won’t even need a cassette recorder or a floppy disk drive to load the software.  Unless you really want to.  After touching on a new version of the classic Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the co hosts marvel at the newly announced Seagate 30TB hard drives for $600.  
Rounding out the show for this week are an article on dropped customer service calls and some 1985 retro MacPaint art.
What kind of emotion would you want your robot to show, and how would the robot express the emotion?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @[email protected] (our home for now) and let us know! 
These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  All rights reserved.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.
Selected Links
Generative Video – A How To
The Decoder post: Google’s Veo 3 video generation model launches on Gemini API with a hefty price tag
original photo by Michael Martine, Sandwich MA June 2025. Veo3 animation July 2025.
Robot Maker
Matthieu Le Cauchois blog post: Shoggoth Mini
Apple Machine Learning blog post: ELEGNT: Expressive and Functional Movement Design for Non-Anthropomorphic Robot
Arxiv paper: SpiRobs: Logarithmic Spiral-shaped Robots for Versatile Grasping Across Scales
Games at Work e500: fünfhundert smooth operator (for discussion on the Apple Pixar robotic lamp)
Wikipedia entry: Horseshoe Crab
Robotshop community forum post: the Facehugger
Technology Old And New
Sixcolors post: Commodore, Apple, and the Early Computer Days
Commodore 
Mini-ITX post: We can build your Mini-ITX PC inside a Retro Commodore 64 Keyboard Chassis…
ESP32 Rainbow post: ESP32 Rainbow ZX Spectrum Reborn
TidBITS post: Seagate Ships 30 TB Hard Drives for $600
Seagate press release: Seagate Ships 30TB Drives to Meet Global Surge in Data Center AI Storage Demand
IMDb entry: The Cannonball Run (another big drive)
The Atlantic article: That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was On Purpose
Three sample MacPaint images from the decryption.net.au blog 



Internet Archive: Zen & the art of the Macintosh : discoveries on the path to computer enlightenment 



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

Ver todos los episodios