[00:00:08.860] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.240] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:09.520] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.490] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.540] - 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 joining us. We didn't have an episode last week. And why was that, Taylor?
[00:00:28.470] - Taylor
I was travelling.
[00:00:30.300] - Gordon
Now, is this what you're going to be talking about this week?
[00:00:33.010] - Taylor
Yes, it is.
[00:00:33.820] - Gordon
All right. Before we get into that then, two things. One is [coughs] perfect timing. I've got a bit of a cough at the moment. So if I do cough, I do apologise. And the second thing is there's some news. For those people who use Chrome, if you're using the... What's it called? The secret mode, secret browser window. I can't think of the name of it.
[00:00:56.140] - Taylor
Incognito.
[00:00:56.870] - Gordon
Incognito. Thank you, Taylor. If you're If you're using that, then be aware that it's only protecting you from people who have access to your device. So Google and advertisers are still able to see where you go and they're still able to track you. This is something that came out in the news just about a week ago, and I thought it was really important to pass on. If you're using Safari, then the private browser mode in Safari doesn't track you at all. Apple are very good at that. Privacy is one of their big things, isn't it?
[00:01:34.550] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:01:36.330] - Gordon
So let's get straight into our topics. Do you want to go first?
[00:01:39.470] - Taylor
Yeah. So my topic this week, well it's just basically just telling you about my travels. What I was up to, and what I've been up to this week and last week, basically. So I went to Barcelona this month for January. It was a really, really pretty, really pretty city. I managed to, went clubbing with the hostel that I was staying with; they have a lot of connections with the bars and clubs and things like that. So you get free entry to them and in return, you're bringing people every single night to your bar and clubs kind of thing. It's beneficial to the bars and clubs to give you this free entry. And that was really good fun. I met a lot of people from around the world, some people from New Zealand, Australia, France, Belgium, Brazil, America, Ireland. And yeah, it was really, really good. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the city. I went to see the Basilica, the Cathedral, a lot of the pretty buildings that they had. And I got my Starbucks mug, which is obviously very important.
[00:02:52.580] - Gordon
Add to your collection that was taking over the kitchen.
[00:02:56.420] - Taylor
And while I was out there, I was working on some of my projects. I'm still working on client work and things like that, and also my personal stuff. And while I was there, I managed to get one of my projects finished, which was really good, that had been going on for a while. And this was a calendar integration with Google Calendar. And so the idea was that you select the date of your event in a form, you put your location in of the event and it will then return you a list of all the available time slots based on the Google calendar. And this is something I built for a friend. And yeah, he is very happy with it, over the moon, and he's been working on getting it integrated to his website this week.
[00:03:49.690] - Gordon
Very good. That's very exciting. That's something you've been struggling with for a while because of Google's way of doing things, isn't it?
[00:03:56.560] - Taylor
Yeah. So Google are very picky with how you authenticate. They don't make it easy. I ended up having to use the Google PHP API client, which was okay, which was fine. And then the calculation and the background task of being able to work out what time slots were available. So you could give it the duration of the event that you wanted to check for. It would then take your venue address, and work out the travel time from the house to the event, and then from the event to your next calendar event. And it would have to basically work out, is there enough time to travel there with a 'Travel Buffer,' which was 10 minutes plus 10%. Also, there was an 'Event Buffer,' so adding half an hour either side of the event duration and then travelling from the event to the next thing in your calendar. And so we had to run all of these processes to determine what time slots were available and return them in intervals. So for example, every half an hour, every 30 minutes would be on the hour and then on half past. Every 15 would be zero, 15, 30, 45, and then back to zero again. And so all these parameters were able to be set to make sure that it worked and was reliable, didn't hit the API too much, and just overall worked as expected. Took quite a lot of thinking about to architecture it correctly and make sure that it worked, essentially.
[00:05:45.800] - Gordon
And this is for Google calendars. Is it easy enough to change it to something like Apple calendars?
[00:05:53.240] - Taylor
Again, Apple don't make it very easy to access your calendar. They use, I think it's the WebDAV system, which again, doesn't make it easy. They don't have just straightforward APIs to give an API key and return all your events, which is quite annoying because I want to use the Apple calendar events and data for my own personal projects that I've got coming up. And I'm having to work around that by using Apple shortcuts and things which isn't the best, but it's the easiest implementation without spending lots of time trying to get it working, essentially.
[00:06:30.260] - Gordon
Very good. So the customer's happy with that?
[00:06:33.020] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:06:33.690] - Gordon
And then you got back and you're straight into a new project that's got a really tight deadline.
[00:06:38.170] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:06:39.290] - Gordon
So that's exciting as well. We'll hopefully be able to share that with you once it's all complete. Anything else you want to say? Barcelona?
[00:06:47.890] - Taylor
I really enjoyed it. I thought it was a very vibrant city. Yeah, I think the people were very very interesting. A lot of people spoke English, which was quite nice. Some countries I've been to, the English fluency, I guess, hasn't been very good. It's been difficult to communicate what I'm talking about or what I'm asking. And because we're English, we just don't bother trying to learn anyone else's language and just force people to use English. And I've booked up for February's trip and I've also booked up March's trip.
[00:07:27.170] - Gordon
Right. Are they going to be a surprise?
[00:07:28.970] - Taylor
They will be.
[00:07:29.860] - Gordon
Okay, how exciting. Right. Anything else you want to say?
[00:07:33.850] - Taylor
I don't think so.
[00:07:35.300] - Gordon
Let me talk to you about new tech. So you might notice that both Taylor and I have this little microphone on at the moment, even though... Pardon me. Even though Taylor's top seems to be trying to strangle him. It's been bugging me the whole time we've been doing this. There you go. So this is something that I've known about for a little while and hasn't been available for the purposes that we need. So let me explain what it is, first of all. It's a product made by a company called DJI. Now, they're best known for drones, but they are moving into camera systems and also audio systems, which is what this is. I have several their products. One of them is the... Oh, I do apologise. One of them is the Osmo Pocket 3, which is the little handheld gimbal camera. And it came with one of these, which is a DJI Mic 2. Now, what's really nice about this is it's wireless. So this can transmit using Bluetooth and can go straight into a device like a phone, which is what we're using as our camera here at the moment. It could go into a computer. It could go into anything that accepts Bluetooth. However, if you've got an interview going on that you're filming and you want more than one person to be captured, then you've got a problem. You've only got one mic. What do you do? Do you put it between them and get so-so audio? Well, the answer is no, you get two. But once you've got two, you can't then Bluetooth two devices to one phone. It just won't record both. You have to decide which one you're using. So they came out with a new system, which is one mic and a receiver. Now, the receiver is sticking out at the end of the phone here. It's a little device about this big. It's got a little screen on it. We can see little bars going up and down. And we know that both of our microphones are being received, and hopefully, they are going to be put into the phone so that it can be transmitted, with both of our audios really close. And it also... Another accessory that they have is this, which is a little case. And this is a really cool little case because it's a charging case, first of all. And what you can do is you can put your mic in here, your mic in here, your receiver in here. I do apologise. If anyone's got a cure for a tickly cough, leave a note in the comments because I'd love to hear it. And once you put the receiver and the two mics in, it does two things. It links them, so it pairs them all, and it also charges them so that they can be fully charged whenever you take them out, so you can be travelling to an event. And this will work on pretty much any device that records audio. So we're using a USB-C at the moment because that's going into the phone, but it also has a little DSLR cold shoe on it, so you can put it on top of your DSLR or your video camera, and it's got an audio out cable; a socket, so you can put a cable in and that can then go to your audio in on your camera. So you can then record it. Also, what's really cool is the Osmo Pocket 3 doesn't require the receiver. It automatically connects to two Bluetooth devices, which is very cool. So if I was using that, I wouldn't need the receiver. I would just need the mics. We are testing this out at the moment to see how it sounds. We are very close to each other. So one mic is picking up the other one. We can see both bars going up every time I talk. We're also using our normal microphone here, which I'll show you. There we go. This is our normal microphone, our Logitech Wavelink. And that is being used so that we can compare quality afterwards. I'm not sure which one we're transmitting with. Let us know if you think it sounds different, whether that be better or worse. We'd love to hear that as well. Pardon me. I've also upgraded my car by putting a dash cam in it, but I think I'm going to leave that till next time because there's a bit I want to say about that.
[00:12:29.470] - Taylor
Okay.
[00:12:30.050] - Gordon
So we'll talk about the dash cam next time. But adding new tech to your existing tech stack, if you like, is normally a really good thing. I'm doing it because I do film lots of things. We do the podcast here. I do a podcast for children's entertainers and family entertainers, which, again, sometimes I go out and I record people physically, not just on Zoom. And this sort of thing would be great if we're sitting opposite each other, it gives me really good audio from both parties. So that's why I've invested in this. I'm going to see how well it does for live shows as well. There is a possibility that I can put these on a stage or near a stage and then record the audio. Again, pardon me. Record the audio on my camera, which is going to be at the back of the auditorium. And maybe that will work. The range should be fine. It's whether the quality is any good. So that will be interesting to test as well. I'm not quite sure how I would connect it up because there's not really a mounting point on it, but it is magnetic, so you can magnetise it onto a... I don't know.
[00:13:48.190] - Taylor
Sheet of metal.
[00:13:48.900] - Gordon
Yeah, but onto a pole that holds lighting, for example, which there are plenty of. The other thing these do, which is really good, is that they have their own internal storage. So I can press record and it will record internally as well as transmitting. So that should there be any problems with the recording, I've got two copies of it, if you like, one that's with the footage and one that's on the actual device itself. So, yeah, I'll come back to these at some point in the future and update... Pardon me. Oh, dear me. I'll update you with my experiences with it out in the field, as it were.
[00:14:33.770] - Taylor
Very nice.
[00:14:35.120] - Gordon
So I think all that talking has made me cough enough. So that's it from me.
[00:14:40.840] - Taylor
That's it from me as well.
[00:14:41.900] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. If you have enjoyed this, then please like, share and subscribe. We're on Facebook and on YouTube.
[00:14:49.790] - 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.
[00:14:56.740] - Gordon
Please join us again next week. We'll be live at 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:15:06.890] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:15:09.600] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:15:10.130] - Taylor
Bye.
