So I feel like an apology needs to be made. I said some things in a previous episode that, well, just weren't the right thing to be saying and it's hard for me to actually record this because I've never had to apologise for anything quite so, I suppose, majoring all my life. Yeah, I will give the full account, you know, I'm going to put my hands up and say, yes, I am responsible for it. So, but yeah, I'll give a full account of it once we get to the podcast.
But I think first, let's just play the theme tune. As you've probably heard, no real fancy music this week. I've forgotten the usual AI generated audio just so that we can get this whole mess out of the way and solved because, well, there's nothing worse than, you know, reporting something wrong or saying the wrong thing, I guess. [upbeat music] However you want to look at it, that's what I did. And, you know, I've managed to do it twice, and I think it would be wrong.
It would be wrong of me not to address it really because, you know, I've had many, many, many, many, many, many complaints and I think, yeah, it'd be wrong for me to not address it. Everybody should take responsibility for their own actions. So I have indeed been pronouncing the name of Smith Hills Farm incorrectly. It is actually Smithers Farm, and I hope that satisfies the people out there that have written to me.
They have endless, endless letters. But yeah, it's called Smith Hills Farm. Oh no, wait, it's called Smithers Farm. See, I still can't get it right. So I'd like to apologise to Smith Hills Farm for saying the name of their farm incorrectly on the previous show. So while I'm here, I was actually wrong last week. A little bit of a correction. The cinema food was actually £78. Way more than I initially thought. Hey, man's that. Play the theme tune! [upbeat music] [music] [music]
This is episode 18 of That's a Freebie, titled An Apology. On this week's show I'll tell you about an upcoming special episode and a change that was introduced last week. [music] Did you spot it? I'll also tell you about the time my daughter turned off the school internet connection for three days. All that and more coming up. . [music] Well, it was an extra long episode last week. I think that was the longest episode I have ever done, if memory serves me right.
It was almost 40 minutes or into the 40 minutes. I can't remember now. It was long anyway. So sorry for that. I, as I mentioned, I have been pronouncing the name of Smivels Farm incorrectly. Only one person told me. Obviously, I was playing around a little bit earlier. But yeah, I'll try and get it right. I actually know it's called Smivels Farm. I just cannot help but...
Look at the word when it's written down in front of me and say, "Smivels". I will probably do it again if I ever mention it again. On with the rest of the show. It's not going to be a huge show this week because it was last week. As you know, I like to mix it up a bit with the episode length. Something that you may have noticed last week that I didn't mention because I decided to do it after the fact, which is usually how these things work.
I added, so as you know I add chapter artwork on Instagram. For all the generated artwork that I do, and I decided it would be quite fun to create a artwork for each chapter. So if you head to the chapter section in the podcast player that you're listening to, that you're listening in right now, you'll be able to see the chapter artwork, and what I will be doing is setting it so that it changes the artwork as, as you listen to the show.
So if you have a quick look at the screen now, I'll give you a second to do that. I'll give you a second longer as well, because some of you might think I'm joking and I'm not. Have a look at the screen of your phone now. There's one of you that still hasn't looked at the screen of your phone. Alright, there you go. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, as you'll see, there's some nicely new AI generated artwork on there.
I'm going to start doing that each episode. I'm still going to put them on Instagram as well. you may even find... There'll be some that appear on Instagram that I haven't put in the podcast itself because I sometimes generate absolutely tons of these things. Sometimes I only generate a couple. Something else that I've been planning working on for quite a while is some special episodes.
I have a few times thought of some things that I'd like to do for an episode, but then it's kind of a little bit more niche, I suppose. suppose like a specific topic that I might like to talk about for an entire episode rather than just doing the occasional episode of it. So I'm going to label these as special episodes. I've got one that I'm thinking about but I'm curious what kind of things would you like to see?
So send me some suggestions. I will consider everything. So obviously anything that you think that would be either good to fit the current format of the show or a complete change of pace and far back then feel free to send me some suggestions because I'd love to know.
what you want to hear really. The episode that I've been thinking of is I want to do a completely 100% AI generated episode and the way I'm going to do it, I mean I say I want to do it, I am going to do it but it'll appear as a special. It'll probably be in the same feed but it'll be released separately from the usual content and the way I'm going to do it is I'm going to start off with chat GPT and I'm going to ask it for some topic suggestions based on each section of the podcast.
how I usually have it. So I'm going to ask it for several AI questions of the week, several gripes of the week, several main topics, several picks of the week, all kinds of things like that. I might even ask it to create a finale, who knows. Well actually I'll have to if it's going to be 100%
AI generated. So what I'll do, I'll ask it those questions and I'll pick the questions that I like, not questions, the topics that I like that it creates and from there I'll then ask it to create me a script based on all of... those topics. I'm literally, I'm just going to read the script. Obviously I'm going to read through it a few times first and make sure that I read it as I would read it when I'm doing the podcast.
I'm just really curious to see how good of a job it can do or how bad of a job it can do. It's just a nice little experiment. I thought I'd release that as a special. I've not started it yet. It's in the planning stages. I have started planning it a little bit. But I'm going to try and release it around the episode 25 mark, I think, unless something else comes along first.
But I think I'd rather do. So yeah, keep your ears out for that. I will obviously let you know when I've done that, because I want to promote it on here as well. [upbeat music] I don't know if you can all hear it, but the rabbit is going absolutely wild this week. Chewing its hutch up. It's having a great good jump about. Yeah, I don't know if you can hear that. I'm going to go quiet a minute, see if you can hear it. Bye bye.
typical isn't it the second I stopped talking the rabbit stopped moving and now it's going again every time I stop talking the rabbit stops jumping about and stops chewing anyway this is great entertainment isn't it so because so little happened this week I'm going to tell you the story about the time I was picking the kids up from school and I'm I'm stood waiting outside school and the head teacher comes over taps me on the shoulder and she says hey how are
I'm okay how are you and she then said did she tell you what she did this week so obviously my heart sank and I was like oh no oh no because my daughter is often in trouble at school usually for some pretty serious things it's not that she's a naughty child she just has trouble with impulse control sometimes those impulses get the better of her especially when she's there's another child that when they're together like they don't like each other at all So usually if there's something...
that's happened it probably involves this other kid. It usually involves them fighting with each other. A pair of them have the same issues with impulse control and they just they don't gel and they're not very good at staying away from each other because unfortunately they're in the same friend group so as much as they are not friends with each other as you would say like they avoid each other because they know it's better for themselves they can't help but being in the same vicinity of each other at times which unfortunately is quite often.
So that's the first thought, I thought, oh no, what have...
they done this time? And she started laughing, the head teacher, at this point. So I thought, oh, well, it can't be that bad. She's laughing about it. So I said, go on, what did she do this time? She said, well, for the last three days, the schools have no internet connection. And obviously, then I thought, oh, no. So she said, yeah. So the gentleman came out from, I think she said it was from BT, came out to have a look at the connection, and they just couldn't work out why there was no internet connection. So they came out the first day.
And there's just nothing been happening. And I did vaguely remember my daughter mentioned it, this actually, that there were certain things that they couldn't do in class because the internet was... I just hadn't really realized that's what she meant.
So the head teacher said, yeah, and so we got to day three of no internet and a technician came out again, and the signal's getting into the school, the signal is getting into the main socket at the school, you plug something into the main socket, and nothing's happening. It just seems to happen, bizarrely. They couldn't work out why. There was no logical reason behind it. And then, apparently, my daughter turns up at the head teacher's door on the third day of having no internet connection.
And she said, head teacher's name, I think I might know why there's no internet connection. So the head teacher said, well, how could you possibly know? And she said, I think it's my fault. Props on her for admitting it and for working it out as well. Apparently, she... She just had a little bit of an epiphany while she was in class that she'd done something, and it was the same time that the internet stopped working.
So she gets taken out of class a few times a day for additional reading lessons and additional maths lessons, I think it is. Well, it was at the time. She doesn't do that anymore, the maths, but she did at the time, but that's what she was out for. She was out for a maths lesson. And it turns out, in the little room that they take them to, to do private one-on-one tuition, there's a poster.
But like a stanchion type poster, it has a little stand and it's... I don't know what it is, but it's like a... Essentially, it's just a poster that they put out for certain things at certain times of the year. It's in storage in there. And behind that poster is a switch. And when you switch this switch, for some reason, it turns off all of the ethernet ports in the school. So the router has got a signal.
The router's putting the signal into the rest of the ethernet ports in the school, but the ethernet ports have been switched off. It's like a master switch to... Just knock everything off all in one go. And she'd seen this switch several times, apparently, and wanted to press it, but didn't want to do it because the teacher was in the room.
And the teacher left the room on this instance to go and get something. And she thought, "Ah, there's my chance." And she switched the switch. Nothing happened. So she just left it switched off and didn't bother doing anything else. And then she just sat down and carried on with her work. And it took her three days to realise that the moment she pressed that button is when the internet went off. So she said to the teacher, "I think it might be this."
So she's taken her into the room, she's moved the poster to one side, why she's ever considered even looking behind this poster is a mystery anyway. But she's pretty nosy, she showed the teacher the switch, and she switched the switch on, and the headteacher said, "Let's just see what happens, shall we?" And within seconds of switching the switch on, teachers were running out of the classroom to go and tell the headteacher that the internet's back on.
So yeah, turns out my daughter switched off the internet connection for the whole school, switch that even the headteacher didn't know was there. She contacted BT again. BT came out again to have a look at this switch said there's absolutely no logical reason why it exists, all where it is and they have no idea where it came from. It looks like it's been manually installed by somebody previously and it's been there for years and no one knew it was there.
So yeah we made my book and I say we, my daughter, made the master switch to the internet for the the school so Miss Chief managed. [upbeat music] For the AI question of the week this week we have If you were suddenly turned into an animal based on your personality and habit which animal do you think you'd be and why? And what would be the first fun or mischievous thing you'd do in your new farm?
Well, I generated this question at the end of last week's episode because I wanted some time to think about it And my answer hasn't changed all week. I would be a hippo because from what I know of hippos, they're pretty chill. But they're also really big. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not really big. I'm not tiny, but I'm not really, really big. But I don't know, I just think I feel like a hippo would suit. Many would probably agree with me.
But the fun or mischievous thing I'd like to do, I suppose it would be both fun and mischievous. I do like to wind people up. I like to play tricks on people. always have those tricks I'd don't like pranks that involve people getting injured, hurt, wet, you know, just things that will cause them discomfort. I'm more of a, I will, you know, I'm the person who, when you leave the room, I'll call your name and then you'll turn back and then I'll go, oh, it doesn't matter.
I do that a lot, actually. It probably really annoys people to the point where nobody ever comes back, you know, if I call the name out when they leave the room because they just don't believe me. So I've had to now make a habit of, if I do actually need someone, I have have to go and get them instead of calling them
a hippo, but I'd like to do a similar thing as a hippo. I'd like to charge up to people and then just change my mind at the last minute. I don't know. I feel like that would be a great way of just, you know, scaring the life out of people. I don't know. I've always wanted to do that, like be a really big animal and just run up to the cars of people driving past and go, "Ah, nah, I changed my mind. Nah, I got you. You thought I was gonna crush you, didn't you? But no, I'm actually a friendly hippo." And then just go to sleep because,
Sleep is the best thing in the world. [music playing] I don't really have a gripe of the week this week, but I do have some follow-up on last week's gripe of the week. If you remember last week, my complaint was Sunday shoppers, and I stand by that. I still feel like Sunday shoppers are the worst. This Sunday, for example, was unbelievable in the number of people that were just all waiting to go into the shops.
shops like after what best prime mark when I come into town and i'm headed towards my place of work there was a queue going from the door all the way down the side of prime mark and going around the back of it and it wasn't due to open for another two hours like this sunday morning what you all doing stood queuing outside a shop to go in and buy stuff it's ridiculous like just wake up like you could turn up at the time it opens, which I don't even know what time prime back up.
Let's assume it's 11 o'clock. You could turn up at 11 o'clock and just walk through the door. All of the same stuff will be on the shelves. It doesn't get emptied. It's just ridiculous. Anyway,
my follow-up actually is something that I'd completely forgotten about when I was going on with myself with last week's gripe. And this one actually irritates me just as much. It's the same thing. It's the Sunday shoppers again. But there's in the Arndale in Manchester there's there's a food court at the top now.
There's an outside entrance to the food court. You go up an escalator and you're in the food court, right? And you can get out the same way as well. And what a lot of people do is they notice. And the reason I know this is because I quite often will just, because I arrive so early,
I go and have my breakfast at the food court. So I'll either take something with me or I'll buy something and I'll go and sit in the food court and eat it. And you can guarantee within seconds of one another, there's somebody that walks up to the internal escalator at the food court and goes
to get down it. And there's a barrier there stopping it. And the security guard always stood there, right? And the number of people that try and move the barrier and the security guard has to say, what are you doing? And they go, Oh, I want to go in. And the security guard say, yeah, it's closed. That's why there's a barrier there. It's, we're not open. The food court's open, but the rest of them all isn't, but I want to go to the shop. They'll go, I just want to go to Boots
or wherever, like Boots is a common one. I just want to go to whatever shop. security guards like, but it's closed. It doesn't open until half past 11. Yeah, but I will. I'll go and stand outside it. I'm like, no, you, if you, if you want a queue, you go and stand outside the mall like everybody else is doing, but you're not allowed in the mall until it's open for security reasons. And you always, you always go and stop away.
Right. But the number of people you see come up into the food, like, all right, I could understand it. If you're in the food court, you've eaten some and you think, Oh yeah, one nip down now because it's due opening.
You still can't get in but I couldn't kind of understand why you think that but the number of people that actually come from outside, up the escalator into the food court and then try to get into the Arndale, so these are people that have seen that it's closed, not been able to get in for, oh, I know a way around this problem.
Oh you don't, it's still closed, even if you got in, it's still closed. Stop trying to go to places that are closed and expecting them to be open, as you can probably imagine. I get very passionate about this subject. [upbeat music]
I've had a new gripe for you this week, but I've actually got two picks of the week, and because well, two great things came out this week. So pick of the week number one is Alan Wake 2 video game on PlayStation, I'm trying to think if it's on anything else, I can't remember.
Yeah, it must be, I'm sure it's available on other formats, I don't think it's an exclusive. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Alan Wake 2, look it up. It's a survival horror video game, and I don't usually like horror things in general, but I do quite like horror video games for some reason, I don't know, just something I've always liked.
Alan Wake 2 is out. I'm not going to tell you anything about it because you need to play it to believe it. It's a great game. However, this comes with the This isn't the second pick, but this is just an additional add-on to Alan Wake 2. There is a recap video of Alan Wake 1, which is by the developer of the game, of the story of the game, and it's an amazing recap video, so I'm going to add a link to that in the description.
Because, if like me, you haven't actually played the first one, I never saw the first one. It's a great recap of the story. It's a mental story, it's a crazy story, and it has helped me understand the second one a little bit better, even though I'm still completely baffled by what's going on half of the time.
The second pick of the week, this week, and the reason I didn't just save this for next week, is because it actually has a bearing on this very podcast. The second pick of the week is Audio Hijack. Now, for those that don't know, Audio Hijack is a piece of software available for the Mac, and it basically can take any audio that your computer creates, so whether it's from an application, a microphone in this case, or anything, literally any audio that your computer creates,
and you can manipulate it, like you can add equalizers to it, you can add all kinds of things to it, it's endless what you can do, and you can record it, and that is literally the software that I am using to record the audio right now for this podcast. You might say, well, if we don't need to do that, then why is it such an important piece of software? Well, it does all kinds of things. For example, just another thing it could do that I use it for quite regularly, I have hearing problems.
I cannot connect my hearing aids to my Mac, whereas if I connect them to my phone, I can play the audio from my phone through my hearing aids. It's a great little feature, it's brilliant, it means I can actually use my phone for audio. I can't do that with my back so I've got a pair of AirPods that I put in.
If I have hearing difficulty, if I turn my Mac up to its fullest volume, I can't hear the AirPods very well, I can hear them, but if there's any noise in the room or if there's any low audio, like in movies and things like that, I really struggle to hear. And this is with all the features turned on to enhance the audio and raise the level of the audio. This is with all the headphone accommodations turned on. I still can't really hear them very well. So, what audio hijack?
What audio hijack can do is I can say, well, this audio that's playing from my system audio, put it through one of their blocks, and I could double the volume of it or I could raise the volume of it. I double it, I set it to 200%. And then I put the audio into my AirPods. And it does exactly that it says the volume of the sound that's coming from a back puts it into my AirPods even louder. You could do that for the actual internal speakers if you wanted to all different ways of doing it.
So, that is amazing, like the things that Audio Hijack could do are pretty special for anybody.
is anything to do with audio on that computer. You can even set the audio from your main system to play through the speakers, but the audio that's coming from Safari, let's say, so you're watching a YouTube video to play through your headphones. You can split audio up and have it all play in different areas as well. It's brilliant. The reason why it's my pick of the week this week is not just because of all that, which is still fantastic, but the reason I did it this week instead of waiting until next week. We've also added a new transcriber...
feature that's available so it will transcribe any audio that you send through it. I'm assuming only spoken audio for a microphone although I don't know I haven't tried anything other than that out yet and it will create a transcript of the the audio that you're recording so I have got that running right now natively on my computer and I can see the little icon it's a transcribing and it's wearing away and what I'm going to do I am going to see how good it is afterwards.
I'll catch up on it next week with y'all and let you know what happened, but I'm going to try and add a transcript to the podcast of the audio and I don't exactly know where you would see that. I suspect you might have to go to VatsOfFreebie.com and use the web player that's designed to work with my podcast supplier to see the transcripts. I'm not too sure exactly where it will show up. We'll find out. We're all learning together, right? That's the whole point.
But yeah, we've added this new feature and I thought it would be great to call it out because it's an amazing feature. We've got some other audio from OpenAI, which is the same company that do the ChatGPT and the DALY3 that we're using, so it all ties in with the stuff that we're using as well quite nicely. So yeah, Audio Hijack and Alan Wake 2. Take a look at the links in the show notes. Finally this week, I have a joke for you. [music playing] I'm not even going to pretend this one's a story.
This is a real joke. It's really funny. So let's see if you agree. What do you call a jail cell for podcasters? Squarespace. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. [guitar strumming] Come back, come back, come back, come back, keep listening. I'm not done yet. How far would you have got if I didn't call you back?