The One with the Comeback

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hey, it's diggy. Right before recording, I decided to have a Cajun burger. I'm not good with spicy foods and I didn't quite anticipate how hot it was going to be.

My mouth is burning right now. Probably gonna hear a lot of this. Really sorry. I'm gonna try and cut it down as much as I can. Really hot.

You may have noticed that you haven't heard from me for quite some time. It's been a few weeks. I don't think it's been ages. I'm not sure. Actually should probably check on that. How long it was, but doesn't really matter.

I'm back. I just needed a break. I think what I really should have done between that's a freebie and starting. Hey, it's diggy.

I probably should have had a bit of a bigger gap. I. Yeah, I just got to a point where I had to plan my whole day around finding time to record, which is great.

You know, it's a nice problem to have got all these thoughts. I need to get out and I need to find a way to. To share them, but it just become so difficult.

I was finding that every single week more and more of my attention was needed on other things. So I then started feeling bad that I hadn't recorded and so on and so forth. You know, the loop, it's a. It's one of those things, isn't it?

But I am back now. I. Hopefully we'll be able to go and continue with a bit more of a frequent state. I still can't speak frequent recording schedule.

I mean, the whole point of this podcast was that it doesn't have to be frequent. But I wasn't really expected to have such a break that I did have. So let's. Yeah, let's. Let's.

So why don't we turn this into a bit of a. I don't know, like a catch up episode. Where could I start? Let's have a look. I've got a list of things to talk about. I have started more consistently going to the gym.

That's one of the things I've been doing with my time off. That's also one of the things that made it more difficult to find time to record because I'd come home. I do not like getting changed in the gym.

You like having a shower after and whatnot. I come home and do that. The gym is at the end of the street, so it's not really that bad.

So I go down, I spend an hour to an hour and a half in the gym and then come back and have a shower here. I much prefer that than showering in the gym. I just don't like it. My gym seems to be full of old people that like to walk around naked.

Not a fan of that. Don't want to be part of that, so I avoid it. And you might say, well, why are you suddenly going to the gym? Because you've never done it before.

I mean, how you would know that, I don't know. But you are correct. I am going to the gym because I. Well, for one, I am overweight and I really need to solve that problem. That is going quite well.

It's been a couple of months now and I can definitely tell a difference. I. I know it sounds strange, but I find that I walk faster. It's really weird. I don't get out of breath as quickly as I used to do.

I've started running. That's the main thing I'm doing at the gym.

The reason being for that is I. I'm supposed to be running a 10k this year, which I promised a friend that I would do with them and I. I had to let them down. I did not anticipate the amount of work I would have to put in to do it. I. I sort of built myself a schedule.

I said, yeah, three months training, easy peasy. And then realized that actually I wasn't going to get to do all of the training that I planned in those three months.

There was a lot of things that would get in the way and it just didn't work out. So I have postponed the run to next year. So I'm going to be doing next year's Manchester 10k.

I'm sure I'll be talking about that more and more over the course of the following year. I will probably even maybe come up with some sort of sponsorship for a charity. I don't know. We will look into that when the time comes closer.

But in the meantime, I'm running more. My goal is to get to a point where I can run 3K comfortably without stopping. Probably the best way of putting it.

I currently can do that, but I do have to slow down a little bit and speed up a little bit, which I suppose is kind of normal. So I think I've. I've hit the point where I'm managing that now. I need to push it to 4k, then of course push it to 5k and so on and so forth.

I'm very happy with my progress at the moment. It's going quite well. Hopefully it will Continue to do so.

And in a few months, hopefully I'll need a whole new wardrobe because none of my clubs there anymore. It's probably not going to be the case, but, you know, one could dream, right?

Something else I've been doing, my time away is I have been trying to learn something I've always wanted to learn to code. I've talked about this before on previous podcasts. I would really like to just. It's just something I've always been interested in.

I know quite a bit of HTML and css. I enjoy, you know, coding in that way.

But I always wanted to be able to write programs, you know, just little applications that help me out throughout the day and things like that.

And I start loads of tutorials and because I haven't got a project that I'm working on, you follow the tutorial, the tutorials complete and then you've nothing really in the end of it that you're using or expanding on or continuing to, to work on. And there's not really any incentive to continue learning.

So I always get like so far through in the tutorials and then I'm just like, it just fades away because I'm not building a product that I want to build. I'm just building whatever the tutorial product is. I needed. I can't even remember why I needed it. It was a few weeks ago now.

I needed to build a tool that would count the number of characters in a document, which you would think would be dead straightforward, wouldn't you?

Because you, you know, you'd think it's built into most computers, but no, it turns out what I had to do in order to count these characters, I would have to copy and paste them into a word editing document and then open and look at the character count inside of that word processing document. It was, it was a bit of a faff. So I thought, well, you know, surely there's got to be something out there that'll just do a char account.

So I did a quick search and I discovered that, no, actually it's not that easy. There are, there are tools out there that are part of other tools. But I didn't want to open a program.

I just wanted to press a key command and get a character count.

So I decided to look at Shortcuts, which is an application on Apple devices where you can build little, almost little programs to fulfill small tasks that you just need, well, you know, shortcutting. So I had a look into it. I've never used shortcuts before. Again, one of those things I'd love to have learned. And I just.

I don't have a need for shortcuts. Like people say, well, I've got the shortcut that will do. You know, whatever it does this, it takes a screenshot.

And I'm like, why do you need a shortcut to take a screenshot? You could just press the key command that does the screenshot. Like, it makes no sense to me.

Some of the shortcuts that people are using, I'm like, I do not get it. I. I could do that just as quickly without having to use a shortcut. So. So I've never used them, never gotten into them.

And so I decided if I could build one that I could then activate with a keyboard command, that's going to be quicker. So I spent about, you know, four hours making it. By the time I'd made it, I didn't really need it anymore. I went down a rabbit hole.

I actually really enjoyed building it. By the end of it, I had it so that I could press a key command.

I could set it to whatever key command I want, obviously, provided it's not already taken by the system.

I ended up with a system that would give me a character count, a sentence count, a character count without spaces, a paragraph count, and estimated reading time. And I've been using it quite a lot. It's quite a good little shortcut.

It took me a long time to build it, and it took me quite a lot of learning to learn how to build it, because it's not as straightforward as you would think.

The principles that I know of coding don't really carry forward into shortcuts, because shortcuts, because for some reason, they just work in a different way. It is a logical way that they work, but you can't just tell it to do something and it does it. You have to give it every single step of the.

Of the process in order to do it. So, long story short, built the shortcut, it's great, it works, it's functional.

But I'd got the bug and I'd hit the point then where I was like, well, actually, what else could I build with shortcuts? Now, to learn it, I actually used ChatGPT. I said to it, look, I want to build a shortcut that does this. And it's like, yeah, cool, let's do it.

Yeah, here's how you get started.

And then I was like, right, well, how do I do this, how do I do that, so on and so forth, and then asked it to explain why it chose certain ways to do it, because that's the point. If you just blindly follow it, it'll build it for you, but you won't actually understand it. You've got to ask it questions along the way.

Think of it like a teacher. In fact, I gave it an instruction saying, imagine you are a teacher and you're trying to get one of your students to understand this.

And so it started explaining things for me. It worked quite well. It's a pretty good learning partner, actually, believe it or not.

Chat GPT now, I'm sure there's lots of people like that are going to say, no, use Claude for coding. I just prefer ChatGPT. It's as simple as that. I've tried using Claude.

I know it's got a reputation for being the best one for coding, but I actually do just prefer chatgpt. So feel free to write to me, but it's probably not going to change anything unless you've got an amazing revelation that I don't know about.

So at the end of it, I, I was like, well, I want to build something else now, but I don't know what else. So I, I said to Chat GPT, right, based on what you know about me, which is a lot. It's an awful lot, right?

I said, based on what you know about me, what sort of shortcut projects could we work on together anyway?

And it sort of started giving off like, you know, just standard, you know, you could make a shortcut that creates a document, you could create a shortcut that allows you to edit a document. You could create a shortcut that adds items to your to do list. And I was like, actually, that's not a bad idea. I use a To do list very heavily.

I'm a very heavy user of the to do app things.

I know I've got a shortcut that I then built with ChatGPT that essentially I could put all the, like, staple items that we like to keep in our cupboards, you know, shopping items for food and things like that. I can press the shortcut and it'll show me a list of them all.

I could just check which ones I need so I can quickly add all of them to a list in one go. So that works quite well. That actually didn't take that long to build. It was to build. To build.

It's already part of the app in terms of they've actually built some pretty powerful features in there to help you do it. So I said, no, no, no, I want to work on something fun, something that I want to see through to the end.

He said, well, why don't you make a name generator for your Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. I was like, oh, that's amazing. That's a great idea. Because we have this thing, Toby and I, where, well, he has this thing and it's quite annoying.

Whenever we go into a place and there's like seven or eight bad guys and he's got to be like goblins. He'll go, what's that one's name? What's that one's name? And I have to quickly come up with names for goblins and I'm not good at that.

So I find myself doing a quick Google search for a list of goblin names. And then he'll go, oh, we've had that one before.

So I thought, well, actually if I could just build this little tool that I could stick up in my menu bar, press a button, generates a name for me. So we started working on it. It took all night and by the end of it we had a tool that would.

Bill will give me a random name for a human character, a goblin character, an elf character. Just a bunch of characters basically. And it works quite well. Really like it. But then I said, well, how can we make this better?

And it said, well, you could add other features to the shortcut. And I'm thinking like, like what kind of features? Like, well, you could generate tavern names. I was like, oh, that's a great idea.

And then I thought, oh.

And I could also generate inventory for shops because often you'll like, I might, for whatever reason I want to put a random shop somewhere because he's running out of certain things and I want him to buy them. And it's, you go in and you go, oh look, it sells health potions.

And actually really you want to say it sells all these things, including health potions. And I thought could build a generator so that it'll generate all the different items for the shop.

And then I thought, oh, could have a generator that will generate random loot. Because sometimes you'll say I want to look in that cupboard and there's nothing in the game pre written that's in that cupboard.

And I'll say, well, roll your dice and you'll roll a quick critical 20 which means he's got to find somewhere. So then I have to randomly come up with something off the top of my head. What if I don't have to do that?

What if I could just press a button and it does it. Oh my God, the possibilities are endless. Anyway, I got partway through it and chatgpt is guided me through it. And it was a.

It was more complicated than I was expecting, but I was. I was in it. I was really happy to be doing it. And then we hit a snag.

I can't remember exactly what the snag was because this was like three weeks ago now. The snag was something along the lines of something wasn't working the way we expected it to work. I say we like Chat.

GPT, as a person, sat with me, it might as well be at this point. And it just wasn't doing exactly what I wanted it to do. And it just. It just wouldn't do it. It was.

It was trying to use an if statement, which is, you say, you know, if this happens, do this, but if something else happens, do this. That's kind of like the. The gist of it, really. But you can add multiples of them, so you can. You could say, you know, if.

If a 20 is rolled, choose from this pot of potions. If anything below 20 is rolled, but above 15, choose from this pot of potions.

You know, that kind of stuff, just so that you're not giving them something amazing for a poor roll, essentially. And it was struggling. So I sort of. I left it on the back burner. I walked away from it and thought, I'll go back to it. I just.

At this moment in time, I need to just let my brain have a think about it because I was actually starting to dream about shortcuts. I was starting to see them in my head forming at night and I couldn't sleep because of the way my.

My brain was showing me pictures of things that it just didn't need to be thinking about at that point. Then I had a revelation. I've always wanted to learn how to write code for applications, so I set a chatgpt.

Can we maybe reimagine this, but build it using Swift instead? It's like, that's a great idea. It'd actually be a lot easier.

Using Swift is a proper programming language, so it's actually going to handle this kind of task even better. It's like, oh, okay. So that was what, two and a half weeks ago?

Now, at this point, I've got a fully working generator that I made using Swift that I can stick on my phone and I could just press go and it will generate me the names of all the characters that I need. It's brilliant. I've learned so much more doing it this way than I've ever learned in the past.

Just following tutorials, I've got plans for all kinds of things I can add to the app. It's just an app for me to use. Nobody else is going to use it. It doesn't even have an icon. In fact, it doesn't even live on my phone at a minute.

I've been running it in the simulator in Xcode because we're not actually going to get to play Dungeons and Dragons again until or probably in a couple of weeks when the school holidays come along. So that's when I get to really test it out and see if it's working. But yeah, spent the last few weeks building an app and it was great.

It was a lot of fun. I really recommend it to anybody that wants to learn something new. See you next time.