[00:00:08.26] - Gordon
Hello!
[00:00:09.11] - Taylor
Hello!
[00:00:10.00] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.23] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.21] - 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 so much for joining us.
[00:00:24.08] - Taylor
Welcome back.
[00:00:25.14] - Gordon
So this week we're going to get straight into our topics. Would you like to go first, or shall I?
[00:00:31.11] - Taylor
You can go first this week.
[00:00:32.21] - Gordon
So this week I would like to talk about some new tools that I purchased. So one of the things that I do a lot of these days is 3D printing, as people who listen or watch this podcast will know. And there's been a couple of things that I've wanted to be able to do that I haven't been able to do, so I actually purchased a couple of tools.
[00:00:56.21] - Taylor
Okay.
[00:00:57.10] - Gordon
Weirdly, they were advertised to me on Facebook, which is normally a red flag for me. I don't normally buy anything that's shown to me on Facebook, but on this occasion I sort of did a bit of research and decided I was going to go for it. Now it's two tools. One of them is a little portable vacuum cleaner, so it's about about the width of my body, and it's got various different attachments on it. And you can use it for the car, which is always good, you know, getting down the sides of the seats and things. And the other end has a blower, so you can use that for blowing off dust or leaves on your car, that sort of thing. But it also comes with like a long flexi hose type attachment and I can use that for going into my 3D printers and just sort of just cleaning the inside, because you get bits of filament and so on that just get into little nooks and crannies that's difficult to get to.
[00:02:00.21] - Gordon
So with a little vacuum, it makes it a lot better. And I didn't want to use the big Dyson because for a start it's a lot stronger suction, and I didn't want to damage the printer or pull out anything that I didn't, you know, wasn't supposed to come out, and I quite like the idea of having like a little portable one I can use. Plus I can use it on keyboards, you know, to get dust and dirt from between the keys, and also little other sort of cameras and things, you know. If I've got little USB sockets, I can sort of get any dust out of those and that sort of thing.
[00:02:39.06] - Taylor
Okay.
[00:02:39.13] - Gordon
So I bought one of those, which arrived and is very good. Haven't used it yet, but but it's arrived and I've looked at it and it's charging, which is always good. So that was the first thing I bought. And the second thing was the same make, and I can't remember the make of it, but I'll put a note of what it is into the show notes. In fact, I'll probably put a link because I bought them from Amazon in the end, and I'll put a link to those in the show notes.
[00:03:05.13] - Gordon
So if you are interested in looking at these tools, you can do. But the second one is like a - I don't know how to describe it. It's like a little screwdriver. It's about sort of the same sort of width, probably not quite as long as the vacuum, but it has different attachments that you can put into it, and it's all one cased unit. So you sort of press the little button at the top and the bit with the battery comes out, and then you can pull the whole section out, and it's got all the tools on like a rotary section, and it's got things in there like little drill bits. So if you want to drill a little tiny hole into a 3D print, or, you know, anything really, then you can do that with this. It's got tools that will help you to sort of get rid of any marks on 3D prints, or sort of grind them down a bit. But again, it's all very precise because it's— these bits are quite small. It's got little sanding heads that you can use to sort of sand around and make things smooth, because every now and then you get a print that needs a little bit of post-processing, and that's what this tool is really good for.
[00:04:20.02] - Gordon
But, you know, you could use, you know, sandpaper and stuff, but it's just not as precise, and it's also a lot more effort to actually get to the bit you actually need.
[00:04:29.16] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:04:30.03] - Gordon
I've used sandpaper in the past, and, you know, by the time you've sandpapered the bit you want, you know, the whole bigger section around it has been sanded down, and then all of a sudden it looks, you know, a bit messy. So that is another tool that I purchased, and again, I haven't used it yet. I'm still looking at the instruction manual just to make sure I use it properly when it comes time. But it's finding little tools and things like that that just elevate your prints, you know, by post-processing, and you end up with a better product at the end of it.
[00:05:07.20] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:05:08.02] - Gordon
And I think that's a really, a really good thing that we should be looking at. You know, how can we make what we do better? I'm always looking at doing that for my magic, for example. One example of that is I've just got a brand new showreel for my magic, my children's magic shows.
[00:05:28.05] - Gordon
It was filmed by a customer 2 weeks ago, and they said they would send it to me, and if I wanted to use it, they would then get permission, or see if they can get permission, from all the parents of the children that are seen in the video, just so I've got that, you know, all covered. And so she sent it to me, and sure enough, it was wonderful, it was really good, and she got permission from all the parents apart from one. One parent of the child didn't want their child to be in it. So what I said I'd do is I would take the video and sort of re-edit it and make sure the child is cropped out of any bits of the video so that we, you know, we keep the wishes of the parents but also get a good video. And then I put a new piece of music on it which I created myself, and the showreel looks really good.
[00:06:19.08] - Taylor
Yeah, I really like it.
[00:06:19.26] - Gordon
I sent it to you. You thought it was good?
[00:06:22.08] - Taylor
I really liked it.
[00:06:23.21] - Gordon
I think, you know, making what we do better, this is a really good way of doing it because I have a showreel, but the showreel I've been using is like maybe 10 years old, so it's always nice to have a new version of your showreel which shows your, you know, up-to-date branding and, you know, how you look as an entertainer, because in 10 years you change, you know, you lose hair, you age, you know, etc.
[00:06:52.04] - Gordon
So it's important that you update these things. That's one of the reasons I update my promotional photographs every other year, so every 2 years or so I do it. In fact, you were there for the last one I did. Yeah. So yeah, the whole point of my topic, I think, is to look at how you can improve what you do. And in my case this week, it was buying a couple of tools that will give me a much better product at the end of it, and also adding a new video, which I haven't done yet but will be adding to my website and social media. So again, I'll add to the show notes when I've got the link for that, so you can go and have a look at it yourself should you be interested. That's my topic. What would you like to talk about?
[00:07:42.06] - Taylor
So I briefly mentioned, I think it was last week, about my personal website. Now this was something that I have had many iterations of, probably on my 7th version. Some of them are looking the same but built with different tools. Some of them are completely different designs. Some of them, yeah, are completely different platforms. And the new version that I'm building is built with Laravel and Vue.js, mainly just because the amount of data that I have— because mainly my personal site is a running life log of all of the data that I track, so the calories, the sleep, flights, notes, articles, appearances, podcasts, films I watch, all that kind of stuff is—
[00:08:30.13] - Gordon
Exercise.
[00:08:31.21] - Taylor
Yeah, activities, exercise, is all stored and logged on various platforms, and I basically take a copy, a local copy of it, and store it on my website. Now, I have a current site that does this, but it was very hacked together. Because there are so many third-party platforms, if one small thing changes, the whole kind of thing topples over and breaks. And so the current site hasn't been updated since 2023, which is when it stopped kind of syncing and importing. So I wanted something that was more robust, but also something that fitted the structure of the— and the nature of the site. It's not like a normal website, it's not like a brochure site, it's not an e-commerce site, it is just an amalgamation of data basically. And so structuring in a way that is helpful but also scalable. So if I have new activity types, so if, you know, if I go rock climbing, well, I still want to be able to log it and the rock climbing type should fit in easily. It shouldn't have to do anything different, it should just import and work. And so it's making them kind of generic enough that you can import any kind of data and also from anywhere.
[00:09:48.22] - Taylor
You know, the whole point is that if an app stops working— so I use Strava for logging all my activity— if Strava were to go out of business, it doesn't matter. I've got all my activities backed up on my website, and I'll just start using another app and then just start syncing from the new app. So the idea is that it needs to also be generic enough that it's not tied to a specific platform as well. I do store the data of like source, so I know where the data's come from, but it's kind of open to easily be able to switch between them. And I thought that when I redid my website, I wanted to improve it. I wanted to have better URL structures, better navigation, be able to do a lot more analysis of the data. So since I've got the data, I might as well kind of do some more in-depth things. So having stats and analytic pages for each kind of data type. So, you know, having a dashboard that shows all the sleep but does accumulations, and you can filter by the last 7 days, last 30 days, last year, or all time.
[00:10:57.14] - Taylor
And you can see all of these charts update in real time because it's also all pulling from the same data. But I've also got what I call data stories, which is a more in-depth look at trends and analysis of the data but in a point in time. So these are kind of like articles but kind of data articles that have graphs and charts in them, and they look at the data and try and add context. So, a really good example is I've done my fuel log; so I've tracked every single time I filled up my car since I got the car in 2018. And what this allows me to do is see the change in the price of fuel, see how often I'm filling my car up, how efficient the car is— so the miles per gallon and cost per litre, and you know how many miles I'm doing per year, etc. All changes based on lots of different factors. Obviously you've got things like the cost of fuel goes up when we had Russia and Ukraine go to war. You know, it went slightly up when the Strait of Hormuz was closed.
[00:12:10.02] - Taylor
I also found that I had 149 days or something between fill-ups, which is obviously very, very large compared to the average, which is like, you know, about 30 days or so. And that was because we were in Covid. And so all of these factors, you can't know just by, you know, automating the data and the stats because there's no context underneath it. So it's more of like an in-depth look and analysis of the current data set. And this is something that only would only get updated maybe once a year when I rerun the analysis and look at what the trends are showing and things like that. But I think it takes the data and makes it meaningful. I think that's the biggest thing is I've always wanted to be able to look and cross-compare different data points, both in the same data types but also across them. And I've never really got around to that because kind of importing the data, storing the data and all that was the bigger issue at the time because I just didn't know how best to structure it.
[00:13:13.15] - Taylor
And now that I've moved away from WordPress, which was kind of holding me back for this kind of type of site, I've got a lot more freedom and flexibility. So yeah, I've been having a lot of fun building that. It's still in development, there's still loads of pages. A lot of data I do have is now all synced, but there's certain data points that are not pulled in yet. You know, my films, things like that aren't synced yet. But then also, once I've got the backdated history, I've now got to set it up so that new data automatically gets pulled in, which is, you know, a completely different kind of issue and thing that I have to focus on.
[00:13:54.21] - Gordon
And I think that's why you're on your 7th iteration, as you were saying before, because you didn't— you liked the idea of collecting the data, but at the time I don't think you knew what you wanted to do with it. Whereas now you've got that quite clear in your mind. You want to be able to compare it and see an analysis of it so that you can see what's changed over time.
[00:14:16.25] - Taylor
Yeah, I think it was definitely at the time I found the data interesting because, you know, I had very, very basic graphs. You know, I used to store it in a spreadsheet before I even had it in a website. And I used to be able to do things like total number of coffees that I had drunk, you know, and I found that fascinating. But now I can go back in time and go, "okay, well, how has the number of coffees that I've drunk changed over the years?" Or a really interesting one is number of fizzy drinks that I drink. I think the most in one year was 476 or something along those lines. Whereas in 2026 I've only had 19, and in 2025 I only had 100 and something. And so that was because I made a conscious decision to drink less fizzy drinks, and you can see that in the data. And so both the kind of hypothesis that I kind of had in my head, I can actually now back up with data, and I can see that change. You can also see around the time, I think it was 2023, when I started going to David Lloyd's and getting serious with the gym and having a PT, my average protein per day shot up from about 56 to 97-ish grammes per day.
[00:15:30.15] - Taylor
And again, that was because I made the conscious decision to eat more protein, to eat more food as well. And so, you know, I compare a lot of the data to when I was ill with my Crohn's, and I can see that the kind of ebbs and flows of how much I've been eating. I had one month, I think it was a couple of years ago, where I was eating probably an average of 300 calories a day, maybe less than that. And I think my lowest was 15 calories in one day. And then the month after that, I was eating 3,000+ every single day. And that was because I had just come out of surgery. I wasn't eating much because I wasn't very hungry and I was still quite ill. And then I was put on steroids and kind of one of the side effects is you eat lots.. And so I was eating, you know, a lot of calories because it was just a side effect. And so again, you can see that live in the data when you do the analysis on it.
[00:16:23.19] - Gordon
And also, I mean, it sounds like, you know, there's a lot of effort going into this for, you know, not a great deal coming out of it, but you can see trends and how they're changing. And so you can catch problems before they become a problem, you know. If you can see, you're collecting stats for your heart rate now. So you can have a data analysis of how that's changing over time, and if there's a problem and it's getting to levels that, you know, are going to be a problem, you find out about it, you know, before it is a problem. And the other thing that you've been doing over the last few iterations is deciding how you want it to look, how the data is being presented so that it's useful information, and how you sort of search for it. And your search facility is major overhaul on this site, isn't it?
[00:17:23.02] - Taylor
Yeah, I mean, I used to just have a basic text field which would just do a kind of like search in the database, which was okay, but you couldn't kind of go granular. And my personal site is very strange in the fact that the target audience is me. I don't really care about other people seeing it or looking at it. You know, when I'm designing and building, I'm going, "okay, if somebody were to use it, could they navigate around the site?" to a point. But also, "how do I want it to work? How do I want to be able to interact with the data?" So I have advanced filters now, allow me to say, "show me all data types that have a photo" or "more than 2 photos," or "where the distance for activities is over 5 kilometres." And it will show me all of the activities. And then I can go and I can even get it more granular. I can say, "show me where, you know, it's 5 kilometres and it's in 2024," for example. And then I can add an 'or' and say, "and also show me where sleep, you know, is greater than 5 hours" or whatever.
[00:18:33.04] - Taylor
And I can very easily see kind of the days and do a bit more of kind of cross-comparisons between does the amount of sleep I have affect, you know, number of activities that I do, or whatever it is, right? But I have a lot more granular control over all the data points as well, rather than it just being a generic text search field.
[00:18:54.10] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:18:54.29] - Taylor
But yeah, a lot of it is built just for me to be able to navigate. A lot of pages probably will be like nested and hidden, so you won't be able to access them or find them like you would on a normal site where you want everything to be accessible and findable. I have a lot of just internal links. So, on each timeline card you can go to the data type, you can go to the date, you can go to the single entry, and from there you can navigate around all the different other places. From there you can go to the month view, you can go to the year view, you can go to a single day view. So all of this stuff is all just embedded within the internal linking. So you can kind of get lost in a way and kind of be like, "well, how did I end up on this page?" But again, the whole point is for me to be able to just show my data and see it.
[00:19:41.17] - Gordon
Well, let's hope that you manage to get everything up and running. And I mean, one of the big points is making sure that all your import data features are running. So maybe there's a way to alert you if something stops working so you can get onto it quickly.
[00:20:01.15] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:20:02.03] - Gordon
Because that's been an issue in the past, hasn't it?
[00:20:04.10] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:20:05.13] - Gordon
Yeah, we wish you luck with that. Maybe you'll come back and tell us a bit more about it when it's ready to go live.
[00:20:11.09] - Taylor
Yeah, one of the things I have been doing is adding a bit more redundancy with the imports. So for example, if I'm importing activities and I'm getting pinged about them. So whenever I finish an activity, it pings my site and says, "I've done a new activity." It will then pull that latest activity, but also do a fetch on the last 10 activities and check, are all of the previous activities imported to the database as well? Just in case something fails, I have that failsafe to go, "Oh okay, didn't actually get imported the one before that. Let me go and fetch that and then bring it up to sync and in line."
[00:20:50.26] - Gordon
Very exciting. Well done.
[00:20:53.03] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:20:53.18] - Gordon
Looking forward to seeing the finished version. We spent a bit of time on it last Monday, didn't we?
[00:20:58.27] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:21:00.05] - Gordon
And that was really good. So that's everything from me.
[00:21:04.10] - Taylor
And me as well.
[00:21:05.04] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. As always, we can be found on YouTube. Please like, share, and subscribe.
[00:21:11.04] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:21:15.10] - Gordon
And if you would prefer to listen to us, or you are already listening to us. We're on all the major podcast platforms and also on your smart speaker. Just ask it to play the latest episode of "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." We'll be back with you next Friday at 1pm. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:21:34.12] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:21:36.24] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:21:37.08] - Taylor
Bye.
