[00:00:09.00] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.23] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:10.08] - Gordon
My name is Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:12.04] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.27] - 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 7 days. And thank you for joining us.
[00:00:25.29] - Taylor
Welcome back.
[00:00:26.10] - Gordon
Today is a day where I want to reflect on a few things that have happened and the reason we didn't have an episode last week. Any news, first of all?
[00:00:38.26] - Taylor
Not from me.
[00:00:39.23] - Gordon
I had some interesting news, actually, that AI is created by a machine, and therefore, the product of that AI is public domain. It's not owned by anyone as far as copyright goes, which was, I thought, very interesting. They did a court case a long time ago about a monkey or a gorilla that took a photo with a camera. And the photographer was claiming it was his camera, therefore it was his photo. And they said, "no, but you didn't take the photo, the animal did." And because the animal isn't an intelligent creature, it didn't count, and therefore it was a public domain photo. And they're sort of applying the same sort of thinking to AI, which is very interesting because it just— if that's the case, it means that no AI is actually owned by anyone.
[00:01:39.08] - Taylor
But surely all of the data it's trained on is copyrighted, and so therefore—
[00:01:44.12] - Gordon
Yes, but the computer is the one that's taking your prompt and creating something, and because the computer is not a sentient being, it's therefore only following code, therefore it doesn't own the copyright. So if, for example, you take— if you make a song, for example, you can't claim ownership of it as far as copyright goes, but you can, depending on your terms and conditions, have creative and commercial use of it, which is really interesting. If you take a song that AI has written and then re-record it yourself, you're using it as inspiration, and therefore what you create, because you created it, is then your own copyright. Interesting, innit? Anyway, that was my little bit of news that I discovered this week. Let's get straight into our topics. Would you like to go first or shall I?
[00:02:41.00] - Taylor
I'll go first this week.
[00:02:41.22] - Gordon
Off you go.
[00:02:42.23] - Taylor
So over the past couple of weeks, I have been working on a tool for categorising and archiving my content and my documents and things like that. So, something that I wanted to do for a long time was basically archive both documents for things like the hospital and things like that, but also be able to recollect it from a search. So the idea being is I can do a search for whatever I want and it will return results. So if I wanted to say, "what was that hospital appointment that I had last year with my surgeon?" for example. And because it has all the data and it has all the information, I can then you know, it can find it because it's archived and it's scanned the document, things like that. And I got the ScanSnap, from Facebook a while ago, and I've only just managed to now set it up and configure it. But what's been interesting was I took it a step further and I created a tool, a CLI tool, that allowed me to basically interact with Evernote and also with AI through the terminal.
[00:04:02.27] - Taylor
But also I created an MCP server, which is something I hadn't done before, which allowed me to then talk to, you know, using any sort of like AI kind of web app or whatever, like Claude Desktop or ChatGPT, and it has context and tools that it can use to fetch notes, edit tags, create new notes, and also do search and finding for notes. So taking that a step further, rather than just archiving, I can then use it to actually get the data back with my own tools. So Evernote have their own inbuilt search, which is fine, and it actually probably does a very, very good job.. But for me, being able to talk to, you know, have a chat and have it be able to fetch it, you know, in real time and go off and do its own calls has been really helpful, and will be really helpful when I'm just, yeah, trying to find out when something was or what I was doing, etc.
[00:05:00.14] - Gordon
And you've created this tool that will look at the document and give it a bit of context as well, so it'll basically type a note in with a bit of information about what the document is, based on what's in the content, right?
[00:05:16.13] - Taylor
Yeah. So a lot of people will just scan the document. It automatically will OCR it when you scan it in through the scanner. But some things that it doesn't do is add kind of actual written notes that are kind of summarising what the document shows or adding a meaningful title. Instead of just having the file name, it actually has a meaningful title. So when you are searching, you're giving that tiny bit more context, and you can pull out the key things from a document. So if you've got a 20-page document about your mortgage, for example, well, you may want to pull out the highlights of what the rate is and how long it lasts and things like that. So obviously, the context, you can already find it inside of the document. But you're pulling out key things that you may want to reference and be able to find and see at a glance. Alongside that, you know, you can obviously still go through the document and read it yourself, or, you know, it can find it from the document, but it just, kind of neatens it up and, kind of just standardises it.
[00:06:23.25] - Taylor
I wanted to be able to do this but not have just a big dump of just documents. Or if I wanted to create a note, I wanted them to be kind of in a similar format, you know, being labelled the same, being named the same, having a tag system that it follows. So being able to tag everything that's related to the flat inside of one tag. And again, I could just say find me all documents that reference my flat name, for example, and that would work. But going the extra mile to tag it— and again, this is it doing its own tagging through the AI - I can then click on a tag and it'll show me all the documents. It makes it slightly quicker for querying for certain things, whether it's a letter type or if it's a, you know, an online document, if it's a whatever it is, you know, all different types of files you can have essentially.
[00:07:21.20] - Gordon
Well, the paid version of Evernote does have AI search facilities and it's not too bad actually. It's— you can do similar things to what you're saying, but if you've done it all at the time of capture, that's just adding more data, isn't it, that it can then search through?
[00:07:42.14] - Taylor
And you can scan basically as many documents as you want and then say, "categorise everything," and it will go through each file individually, look at the content, kind of get context, and you can give it your own prompt and your own context as well to say like, you know, "I live by myself in a flat, this is the name for my flat, I play a lot of sport," things like that. So it's going to have context about who you are as well. So when it's writing tags, when it's writing the notes, it's got context about you as well without having to go through every single note and get the context.
[00:08:14.02] - Gordon
That's very good. And we should say the ScanSnap is a hardware scanner that allows you to put a bunch of documents into the feeder, press scan and it scans double-sided, so it scans both sides in one pass and then creates, in our case, PDF files and uploads to Evernote. And that's what ScanSnap is. And it's a really good system. I discovered it a long time ago and I've had, I think, 3 ScanSnaps now. Not because there was anything wrong with them. It's just I've upgraded to the latest and the best to make it faster and higher quality and so on. But it's really good and it works very well with Evernote. So yeah, welcome to ScanSnap and Evernote. It's another person on there. I think friend of the podcast Marc Summers did it at one point as well. I think even Paul Longhurst, another friend of the podcast, has done that as well. So there we go. I'm sort of suggesting these things and people are doing their own research and coming to the same conclusion, which is always a nice thing. Anything else you want to say on that?
[00:09:17.12] - Taylor
I don't think so.
[00:09:19.02] - Gordon
So my topic is about Trix, T-R-I-X. Now I visited Trix, which is a children's entertainer convention that happens every May. And this was in Stoke. And I've been going for many years now. And it's basically two guys who put together this convention. It's a day and a half convention, I think is probably fair to say. So it's a full day, but it's also the evening before, starting about 5 o'clock in the evening. So it's, you know, by the time we finished at midnight, it's sort of half a day's worth, you know, maybe even nearly a full day's work, isn't it? It's like 7 hours, isn't it? And so that happens every May, and I go along to it for several reasons. One is that we have lecturers, and it's always good to see lectures on the topic that is something I do as a job. So you can learn from other people, you can listen to what they have to say, you can make decisions as to whether it's something that would work for you or not. And you're getting someone else's experiences, which is a little bit similar to my podcast, FACE: The Podcast, which is a different podcast, and that's designed for family and children's entertainers, and that's a similar sort of thing.
[00:10:50.26] - Gordon
We talk to other entertainers and you can sort of listen to their experiences and take from it whatever you can. But we also have magic shops that go along, so you can sort of have a look and see what they're offering and again decide if there's something you need or want for your show, or something that we end up just putting in our cupboard, which is the other thing magicians are wont to do. They quite often buy things and it goes in a cupboard, never to be seen again. And these things aren't cheap either. Normally they're very expensive. So it's a, you know, it's the longer you do magic, the less you do an impulse purchase. You think about it a bit more and then you make a decision. And sometimes that means you miss out because they've run out, but you do carefully consider things before you purchase them. Just because you don't want to put it in your cupboard and have it never see the light of day again. So we did that. But the thing I think that is the biggest draw for me to these sort of events is meeting all the people.
[00:12:06.00] - Gordon
People that I know, people that I don't know, people that I have already become friends with, people that I make friends with, and some people I just don't have time to speak to, and, you know, next time we have this sort of event, we'll speak to them then and, you know, have a, make a new friend. And it's sort of catching up with them and what they're up to, because most of them live in lots of different parts of the country, sometimes different countries, and you only get to see them, you know, once a year, maybe twice a year if they go to Blackpool as well. And so it's quite nice to catch up and just find out what's been going on and discuss ways that you run children's parties and I got into a conversation with two guys from, ooh, where were they from? Possibly Germany. And they don't do two-hour parties. They do 45-minute shows and then they move on to the next party. That's it. That's all that they do. Mainly because they don't have a two-hour party format in their country. That's not how their birthday parties work. So it's really interesting to listen to different cultures and how they run a party.
[00:13:23.24] - Gordon
And so that was all very exciting. And we had a cabaret act. We had a guy called Spencer Jones who plays the part of Kemp in Upstart Crow, which is a TV comedy by Ben Elton, which funnily enough, I'm watching at the moment. And it was really surprising because he came on and started doing his act. And I looked at him. And you know how you sometimes think "that guy looks familiar and I don't know why." That's exactly the feeling I had. And we looked him up afterwards and it's like "he was in Upstart Crow." "Ah, of course he was. I'm watching that at the moment." I knew exactly who he was as soon as I read that. And I'm glad I did because I got to say hello and had a photo with him, which was lovely. And he was a very nice guy.
[00:14:10.14] - Taylor
Nice.
[00:14:11.13] - Gordon
So that's Trix. Used to be called Trix in the Stix. Now it's just called Trix because it's in a city centre. But we did have some news from the two organisers, and that news was that next year, 2027, is going to be the last Trix as it is. And the main reason for it is declining numbers. So, they used to get, I believe they said, 240 people, and they would sell out in an hour, sell all the tickets in an hour. And now they always have tickets available. And I think this year they had 94 people. So it's quite a drop, isn't it? And when you're trying to plan an event and the costs are going up, not down. So you've got lecturers, you've got the venue hire, you've got, you know any staff and equipment that you need to hire in. You've got your cabaret act. All of these things require expenditure. And if you don't know how many people are actually coming, so therefore, you don't know what your budget is, it gets really difficult to plan something like this and even more so to make a profit from it.
[00:15:23.07] - Gordon
And they put a tonne of extra time in because they do videos that are specific for the event. They film things specifically for it. And they have sketches and skits and things like this that they plan for the event, you know, songs that they have. And all of this is time and effort, which, if people aren't coming is time you could be spending on other things. So they've made the decision that next year is going to be the last one. This might change. It might not. But for the time being, that's what's going to happen. They get their life back a bit because it takes up a lot of time to plan these sort of things. We know that because we were sort of partially involved with the planning of POP.
[00:16:09.04] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:16:09.19] - Gordon
The bubble convention. We know how much effort and time goes into it. So yeah, I'm sure they'll enjoy the extra time that they have without having to worry about a convention. So that's why we didn't have an episode last week. That's what I was getting up to. We've got one more I'm going to go to next year. So it's hopefully going to be a big sell out because I'm hoping lots of people will go, "oh, it's the last one, we'll come along to it." So hopefully that will be the case. And, you know, I'm sure we'll have lots of looking back over the last 15 years to see what we did, and there'll be lots of tears and so on next year because people enjoy going, they enjoy meeting their friends and having time to learn. So hopefully something else will come along in it's place, someone else might take up the mantle, who knows. We will see. But for the time being, next year's the last one. That's everything I wanted to say. Anything you want to add?
[00:17:09.00] - Taylor
I don't think so.
[00:17:10.04] - Gordon
That's it for this week then. Thank you so much for joining us. As always, we're on YouTube. Please like, share, and subscribe.
[00:17:17.20] - Taylor
You can also go to our website, thisweekwith.co.uk, to find all of our past episodes.
[00:17:22.20] - Gordon
And if you prefer to listen to us, we're on all the major podcast platforms as well as your smart speaker. Just do a search for "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." We'll be back with you next week on Friday at 1pm. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:17:40.23] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:17:43.08] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:17:44.21] - Taylor
Bye.
