[00:00:09.240] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.730] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:10.210] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:12.090] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:14.230] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week with Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And welcome back. Thank you for being with us. This is a little bit of an unusual episode again, because it is currently Tuesday.
[00:00:33.030] - Taylor
It is.
[00:00:33.690] - Gordon
And we are recording this ahead of Friday because it's my turn to go away. Taylor has just recently got back and now I'm going away. I'm off to Las Vegas on Thursday morning at Silly o'clock. And so I won't be here on the Friday. So we thought we would record the episode so that we didn't miss out. So that's that. I will talk to you about my trip when I get back. I am gone for... There'll be one episode that we're going to miss and then I'll be back after that. So next week's episode probably won't happen unless we find a way to do it remotely, but just assume we won't be and then it will be the week after that we're back again. Any news first of all?
[00:01:24.000] - Taylor
Not from me this week.
[00:01:25.990] - Gordon
I did have some news, but I didn't write it down to make a note. So we've had a bit of an update with Apple Mac OS up to Ventura, and in fact, Taylor is currently running that on the computer, which records all the audio for us. And we thought we had an issue with the audio then with the microphone not working with the new version, but it appears it does work. What doesn't work is my storage system. So I've got two big boxes that have a huge number of hard drives in them and that currently, I believe, from reports of other people, does not work with the latest operating system. So I'm not updating just yet because otherwise I lose access to all my storage.
[00:02:18.280] - Taylor
It's not good.
[00:02:19.050] - Gordon
No, it's not. So we haven't done that just yet. So if that's it for the news, let's go straight onto our topics. Do you want to go first?
[00:02:28.390] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:02:29.140] - Gordon
Okay.
[00:02:30.260] - Taylor
So, we've had a kind of tradition for the past three years - ish, maybe, where at the end of every year for This Week With, just before we go to the new season, we reveal a new website, a new design. And so this week I'm going to be starting just preparing kind of where we're going to go with the new design for the next season, which will be season four.
[00:03:02.810] - Gordon
So that starts in January. So what we do is our seasons run a calendar year. So our new season is going to start in January, on January 1st.
[00:03:12.400] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:03:13.910] - Gordon
With a new colour.
[00:03:15.450] - Taylor
Yeah. So we have a new colour and a new design and yeah, it just keeps things fresh. Obviously, new technology is always coming out and we want to try it, and it gives us a reason to test it and try it.
[00:03:27.490] - Gordon
The only reason you want to do it is because you just aren't happy with how it is at the minute. There's a few little glitches that you're not happy with. You just want to redo it again.
[00:03:37.000] - Taylor
I want to fix the stuff that's not working, and rebuilding it is the easiest way.
[00:03:42.340] - Gordon
Okay, that's fair enough. So any thoughts on what you're going to add or change in the new version? Or is that something that we're going to keep as a secret for January?
[00:03:54.960] - Taylor
I think I want to keep quite a lot of the same types of features. So with the current website, we have a nice search drop down on the homepage. We have quite a good search functionality and the cards are quite nice where you can, it's called like a quick preview. So you can click on this little plus icon and it will show you the show notes in full without having to click into the...
[00:04:19.990] - Gordon
Episode page.
[00:04:21.970] - Taylor
It's a very quick way, which we actually used today when I was actually looking to see if I'd spoken about a topic, because I could quickly just open it and see, okay, have I spoken about it? Quickly just look through the show notes, no, ok, go to the next one. I didn't have to keep going back and forth. It was just a matter of clicking on the show notes and open it. So some stuff like that I definitely want to kind of keep because I think it's useful. And obviously you want to keep some sort of familiarity with some people to be able to navigate. But it's also a good chance to try out new ideas and think about how we can make it a better experience for the user.
[00:04:58.420] - Gordon
So one thing that we do need to be very careful with is the audio files for every episode are currently being used for our podcast. So if you listen to this show instead of watch it, you'll listen to it on your favourite podcast application, and it's grabbing all the audio files from the website so we can't change the location of those files because otherwise we'll lose all of the audio in the podcast. So that's one thing that we need to be very careful of.
[00:05:34.900] - Taylor
Yeah, I mean, we've done it before. We kind of exported all of the posts or the episodes and reinforced it and making sure they had the exact same file structure and things like that and it seemed to go all right. So, yeah, hopefully it will continue that way.
[00:05:51.010] - Gordon
Okay, so that's something to look forward to then. Anything else you want to say on the rebuild of it? You're obviously rebuilding it because there's little glitches, but as you say, new technology comes along. So what will you be using to create the new iteration?
[00:06:10.240] - Taylor
So I'll be using Gutenberg, which is kind of the new way that I've been moving forward, purely because it's easier to edit, easier to maintain, and it kind of uses the native architecture that WordPress is running on, which is obviously react in the editor, in the back end editor. And yeah, I just like the workflow and I think that going forward it will make things maintainable and things like that and hopefully also just fix the issues and try and be creative and it will lend itself to being useful for more than one thing. Because obviously I have Snippet Club so I can use a lot of the stuff that I build on the podcast website as new tutorials and stuff. So it's kind of like a double win really.
[00:07:01.330] - Gordon
And we might even consider having sort of adverts on the website for our own endeavours. So Snippet Club and Online Booking Assistant, maybe one for Drayson design, one for The Creative Tinker. We could have sort of a banner type system that can rotate these depending on different people who come into the website. Which is not something we've actually done, but it might be, it might be time to do that now. 'Cause again, it's going to help with SEO, it's going to help with potential customers. If people come to the site and they can then see what is linked to what we do and what we talk about. And that might be something we could consider. What do you think?
[00:07:48.300] - Taylor
Yeah, I think that could be a nice idea. Having the ability to select the type of advert that we want to show on each episode. So if we link to one of the services or projects that we've worked on, then we can have a banner for that one because we've spoken about it, for example. Or we could also have maybe a whole page with all of them and each card and then they either have their own page or they just link directly to the project site.
[00:08:19.660] - Gordon
Yeah, and I don't think we should have the website ad driven.
[00:08:25.960] - Taylor
No.
[00:08:26.410] - Gordon
I think it should just be there as a sort of maybe, one ad maximum, being shown at any one time.
[00:08:34.050] - Taylor
Of course.
[00:08:35.140] - Gordon
So that it's not going to get in the way of the content, which is what people come to the site for really. But it's nice to have the idea of being able to show an advert that's relevant to that episode maybe.
[00:08:49.380] - Taylor
That's what I meant.
[00:08:50.260] - Gordon
And if we have a friend or a colleague or someone else who is a guest on the show, we can link to their services as well, which would be quite nice. It's a nice way to thank people for coming onto the show.
[00:09:05.590] - Taylor
Yeah, definitely. I think that would work well.
[00:09:07.740] - Gordon
Yeah, good. So there you go. Something to look forward to for January.
[00:09:12.120] - Taylor
If you have any other ideas of things you think would be cool to implement, that would be cool, that is different to other podcast websites or things that you think that could be improved, or you know, better experience for you to find episodes, or maybe we add the ability to 'favourite' episodes so people can favourite them if they...
[00:09:35.680] - Gordon
Well that means they have to have logins.
[00:09:37.650] - Taylor
Not always. Sometimes they're done based on like cookies and stuff.
[00:09:40.990] - Gordon
But then it won't work across multiple devices.
[00:09:43.590] - Taylor
No, they wouldn't. But we could see which ones people like the most. People could just like, it's like a 'like' I guess.
[00:09:50.050] - Gordon
Okay.
[00:09:50.050] - Taylor
Where it's not attached to any one person, it's just the people that visit.
[00:09:55.270] - Gordon
Okay.
[00:09:55.680] - Taylor
That could be an idea as well.
[00:09:56.910] - Gordon
Yeah. There you go. Lots of options. Anything else?
[00:10:01.500] - Taylor
No, I think that's everything.
[00:10:03.260] - Gordon
So today's topic from me is AI. I was looking at something just this morning that... Ooh did you hear that? I am expecting a delivery. If that is my delivery, I'll rush out and get it and Taylor can talk about my subject and what he thinks about it. You can hear our dog barking at it. So AI is something I've been using for quite a while now, whether that be text AI, so a way to create content using a text based artificial intelligence machine learning where you give it prompts and it then writes for you. It's not fool proof. You do need to go through it and edit it and change it and fix some grammar every now and then. But the more recent thing is graphic AI; creating images using artificial intelligence. And we have spoken about this before with Dall-e. There is two new things that I want, possibly three, that I want to talk about. One is Diffusion Bee. Now this is an application that you can download onto your computer, and to be fair, up front here, it needs to be a reasonably powerful computer. Because what it's going to do is it's going to use a technology called stable diffusion, which will allow it to learn from a model, your computer, that is. It will learn from a model so that when you type in prompts, it will then create an image for you. And it's all done locally on your computer. Now things like Dall-e use similar technologies but it's using server farms. So it's going to create the images really quickly because it's got a lot of power behind it, a lot of processing power behind it. Whereas home computers don't have quite as much processing power, so it will take longer to be able to create an image. But from what I've seen of it so far, it is fantastic. It just creates the most amazing images ever. And you would look at it and you would never believe that a computer has created it. And there's some new additions to this now; you've got upscaling so you can bring an image in and you can say "make it bigger, but don't lose any quality." And it will use artificial intelligence to sort of fill in any quality issues so that you get a larger image that looks the same. Which has been done before, but not using artificial intelligence. You've also got something called 'out painting.' And this is when you have an image and you want to extend the image to make it a larger image or a landscape image, or a portrait image. And you're going to have these areas that have no content because it's bigger than the original image. And so out painting will use artificial intelligence again to look at the image, see what it's all about and paint into these new areas so that it becomes a seamless image, which is...
[00:13:29.850] - Taylor
Yeah. That's very clever.
[00:13:30.670] - Gordon
Mind blowing. You also have 'in painting' where you can have an image and you can delete part of that image and the AI will then fill that gap with whatever it needs to do to make the image look okay again. So, for example, if you've got an image with an object or a character in it that you don't particularly want there, you can just erase it and let the artificial intelligence fill it up again with a content that will make the picture look like it was never there in the first place. There are two things that, three things, I should say, with the upscaling the Diffusion Bee will do. And it's a free software. Now, it's available for Mac. We've got our Mac Apple silicon version, which works really well because the processer's is really fast. But it is available, or similar things maybe, are available for other platforms. So have a look for 'stable diffusion' and apps you can download and have a play because they're very very exciting. So, the second thing that I was going to talk about is a Software As A Service, which is called 'stock.AI.' This is using similar technology, but the idea is instead of just going to the stock library, typing in what you're looking for and then seeing whatever results they have and hoping there'd be one there that suits what you need, this is slightly different. It will search the available images. But more importantly, if it doesn't have an image that fits into what you're looking for, fits your prompt, it will then use AI to create an image for you.
[00:15:23.160] - Taylor
That's pretty clever.
[00:15:24.300] - Gordon
Which is madness! Now, I mean, I have tried it and the quality of the images are... The quality is good, but the actual how it looks at the prompts and creates an image for you is a little bit hit and miss sometimes. You're going to get elements that aren't right. You're going to be looking at images going, "there's just something wrong with this, I can't use it." And it is a paid for service. There is a free part of it that allows you to have a few generations, but the paid for service is the one that is going to be of use once it gets to a point when it's really good. Now, talk to them about stock.AI while I answer the door. I'll be back.
[00:16:12.560] - Taylor
I mean, I've never heard of Stock AI. This is something new to me. However, something I have used is something called 'Midjourney,' I think it's what it's called. And it's a service that you can pay for and it generates them using these, obviously farms and stuff on discord. Sorry, I was talking about Midjourney because I didn't know what...
[00:16:38.050] - Gordon
Yes, Midjourney, that's a great one. There's some really nice sort of fantasy type images that are created with Midjourney; they're great. So, I was just going to finish off by saying that the guy who made stock.AI has just come out with a brand new service using AI, which I think is fascinating. So the next generation AI is where you feed the AI information. So you take pictures, for example, of an object, a person, a dog, cat, whatever it is, and the machine will learn all about that from the photos that you supply it. And there was a video, actually, that I saw from the Corridor Crew on YouTube, which was great. They created all these images of people and then fed it in and created new images in a story type way. So the prompts were given as a story, and they created like a scrapbook, if you like, or a comic, with characters that were recognisable because they were the people that were creating it. And it looked amazing. So the new service is called and I wish I looked it up. I think it's 'profilepicture.ai.' Now, if I've got that wrong, look in the show notes because I'll make sure I look it up. But the idea is it's like $30 and you feed it ten plus images of yourself, or your dog, or your cat, from different angles, different lighting, different times of the day, from sort of shoulders up, full body, closeups of the face, face at different angles, etc... Is that the front door?
[00:18:27.870] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:18:28.240] - Gordon
Right, you go this time, I'll carry on talking. And what it does is it learns from all of this and it then will create 100 plus profile images for you. And these images are going to be sort of you as a dwarf in Lord of the Rings, or it will be you in armour, or you as a fairy, or in a cartoon mystical fantasy land. And all of these images are created by the computer using the same technology which you can then use to put as your profile image, basically. And it sounds really really interesting. So I may actually give that a go and see what we come out with, because if it comes out really well, then I have a feeling there's going to be some really cool profile pictures from lots of people who use this service. As far as I can see, it's a one off price and you get one off collection of images depending on what you upload to it. And it takes time to learn using machine learning from the images that you've actually uploaded. So, yeah, it's not a quick thing. You have to take the photos, you have to upload the photos. It then takes time to process them. And then will give you your images. And again, there's no idea as to what the images are actually going to look like until you actually see them. So, yeah. But the ones I've seen that people have already done have been fascinating. They've been really really good. So that's it. That's all I have to say. Taylor has left the door open, which is very frustrating because I can hear him. I'm trying really hard to concentrate on what I'm saying. I think he is done. You needed to close the door because all we could hear was you talking. There we go. Right, so that is me done. Is there anything else you want to add to this? You have no idea what I just said.
[00:20:33.160] - Taylor
No.
[00:20:33.610] - Gordon
So that's going to be fun. Anything you would... Have you got your Pyjamas on?
[00:20:37.470] - Taylor
My pyjama bottoms, yes.
[00:20:37.980] - Gordon
Okay. So, anything else you want to add before we sign off for the day?
[00:20:42.150] - Taylor
I don't think so.
[00:20:43.390] - Gordon
Okay, so that's it from me. Thank you very much for watching, as always. If you have enjoyed it, please like, share and subscribe so we can get a nice big audience for our refresh on the website in January. You can find us on Facebook and on YouTube.
[00:21:01.540] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes and anything we may have spoken about.
[00:21:07.830] - Gordon
So until two weeks time. We may be there next week, but let's assume we won't be. So, two weeks time on Friday, 1p.m. we will be back as normal, doing a new episode. So until then, thank you for coming. My name is Gordon. I am from Drayson Design.
[00:21:28.330] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:21:31.360] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:21:31.990] - Taylor
Bye.
