This Week with Taylor & Gordon

Gordon has been rebuilding the Sanderstead Dramatic Club website, replacing a 10-year-old manual site – https://www.sdclub.org.uk The new site runs on WordPress but is fully dynamic, pulling in shows, photos and awards automatically Taylor and Gordon designed the site together in a single Saturday session for another group, ATG, which led Gordon to finally tackle his own Using AI, Gordon ext...

Severe PHP vulnerability patched this week, rated 9.2 for severity The patch was released after an unofficial disclosure, leaving site owners to scramble with mitigations Gordon’s am-dram play “A Murder in the Mine” sold out every performance, including an added dress rehearsal for turned-away fans A three-act format: a staged murder and jewel theft, audience questioning of suspe...

Opening night of Gordon’s play – Taylor has been helping backstage, with a full update next week Taylor has been sorting out his smart home with Home Assistant Making the home feel smart – automations that work without needing to open a dashboard Motion-controlled lighting, with guest and sleep modes to stop lights coming on when they shouldn’t Using pen.dev to design a custom Home Assistant inter...

pen.dev – https://pen.dev Figma alternative – which connects to agents and MCP Creating components Thinking about the UI Starting with the look of the finished product AI makes people think less Keeping control of the project Speeds up progress It has access to your codebase and can build factually Checking accessibility Building in vector – makes it easier to build the project B...

Murder in the Mine The audience get to ask questions of the cast to figure out who did it Recording the lines to then listen to it ChatGPT was brought into service to fix issues I needed a personal mp3 with just my cue lines and my lines so I could listen just mine It suggested a recording with gaps the length of my line to allow me to speak it I ended up with two versions with the line and withou...

Waveshare ESP32 -C6 – a small low-cost, low-power system on a chip microcontroller with WiFi and Bluetooth It has a 1.47″ screen, and needs USB C plugged in for power Claude was then given access and it flashed the software I designed onto it Spark Graph to see  Solar Generation vs House Load Also purchased an ESP32 JC243W328C 2.8″ touchscreen Printed 3D cases for both of them &#...

The jumper is on, it’s getting colder. Spatie / Bloom – GitHub repository Worktrees in parallel Setup and startup scripts Icons showing the states Keep an eye on all projects Open Source – free to use Limitations – Herd app didn’t work due to hard coding Devs fixed the issue Agents able to now view their work and check it Lots of alternatives, but this is being used b...

Getting Back To Normal Christmas, Summer Holiday, Easter – normal schedules change Everyone is now back and things are going back to normal Available for Events for adults – https://www.pipkennedy.co.uk Busy Bar now shows me shows that are happening that day Lots of backups to make sure I don’t miss a show Making Tax Digital is taking me more time than expected as I had to move t...

We are back after the holiday break Taylor’s personal website is now online Rebuilding to make sure it doesn’t easily break like the previous versions Keeping automations and syncing out of services like Make or another 3rd party Scalability was important with this amount of data Tracking sleep, food, flights, activities, notes, and loads more Data is fascinating, and thats why trackin...

Unified Calendar When sharing a calendar with people it gets difficult to manage When you have group activities there are duplicate entries Creating a custom calendar that hides duplicate entries Create different custom calendars as required Writing notes in events could still be a challenge Keeping event details in the diary where you would expect to find them Concept is working – control p...

Code Workflow Touching the same files with different agents confuses things Using worktrees and separate branches Reviewing code to make sure they are as expected Too many files to check easily 20 issues can be separate and open a new branch for each one, set up an agent and then merge Paid vs Free GitHub Account .env security Busy Bar – https://busy.app/ Pomodoro Timer with a display Develo...

A hot week End of the school year shows Zen Browser – https://zen-browser.app/ A calmer internet – reimagined ways to browse the internet Left sidebar tabs – keeping your browsing area clean Taylor didn’t like Chromium based browsers and this one uses the Firefox framework Three different frameworks available – Chromium, Webkit and Mozilla Browsers adopting newer tech...

Another Hot Week I created a song about the heat – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f7HVHCe88w&t=13s Historical Data – backdating data for the new personal website Finding data from the past – flights for example Going through emails of the past for flight details Also, Events, theatre shows, football matches, and other trips Way Back Machine is good for some of these things...

New Tools purchased Fanttik Slim V8 Apex Car Vacuum – https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D8T3LTNN Great for the car to get down the sides of the seats Hose attachment great to get into the 3d printer Can be used for keyboards and electronic devices Fanttik F2 Master Mini Cordless Rotary Tool – https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F3CPRZXW Lots of attachments for drilling, sanding, polishing etc. P...

Very hot week Celebrating 250 episodes of This Week With Statistics for the podcast Episode 1, 24th April 2000 Keeping a record of what we have been up to Total run time Shortest and Longest episode Average length, Average time between episodes Number of episodes per year We outlived the pandemic which was the reason for starting Health Kit for the podcast Transcripts and thanks to the lady behind...

News – Apple WWDC happened, which means new software beta’s and an insight on new AI features Learning a New Skill – 3D Modelling Huge subject to learn Personal version of Fusion Metal bathroom holder needing to be modelled and printed in plastic Simple model, but there were lots of measurements to get right Didn’t ... Read more

New location, Gordon’s Office We went to Wordcamp Europe in Poland, Krakow European Wordcamp is the biggest of the conventions Reasons for going – networking with friends and colleagues Theme this year seemed to be AI Connecting WordPress using MCP to Claude Using AI to build pages, perform WordPress operations, correct grammar, create images, pretty ... Read more

News – AI is created by a machine, so is not owned by anyone! Archiving Documents – for personal and business purposes Making searching easy and have it bring up relevant documents MCP server – to work with Evernote using AI on a CLI AI will create a context for the document – notes summarising ... Read more

Show week Sorting out collection of props – old and more recent – some valuable, some not Spreadsheeting all the boxes Printing a Book Box with a living hinge for the cast Running out of filament at one point Not a great deal done on a show week Very tiring Waiting for Ikea to send ... Read more

The Diary of Anne Frank Tickets for 14, 15, 16th May 2026 – https://www.parlourplayers.co.uk Sending large files over the internet – 4.8GB wetransfer.com – maximum of 2GB for free accounts Blaze Quantum – for larger files – https://blaze.cx/ Purchased on AppSumo many years ago Keeping track of the software available to us on a spreadsheet ... Read more

Internet went down Thursday Night – and took a week to get back up Lots of hassle getting it fixed Cloud smart home devices all stopped working Reflection – looking at yourself through a friends eyes One thing they think you do well and one thing they think you could do better at Would anonymous ... Read more

Client Handling – Losing a Customer Delays on both sides Need all content before we start work on the site The sitemap grew from 12 pages to 42 pages Communication with the client was not good New design requested When the content is delivered the work then needs scheduling in The design is being taken ... Read more

Rehearsing for Anne Frank Co-Working for half a day a week Keeping the other person accountable Using your skills to help the other person Not wasting time chatting Progressing projects quicker Would this work for you? Time is scheduled every week and kept clear Considering adding a system to monitor and check progress Data to ... Read more

Shows all over Easter Waited 19 years for this… I had a call to see if I wanted to upgrade to Fibre Upgraded my internet to Full Fibre (FTTP) which is now available, last Tuesday Fused fibre cables together with a £4000 machine 20Mbps (on a good day with ADSL) up to 800Mbps download, and ... Read more

Last Remaining POP! Jobs Bubble Convention Videos – post process All videos complete and uploaded for attendees Adding a process to the website for video distribution and purchasing Limits in place for who can view and purchase them Using Vimeo for protection to keep the value Re-using a similar system from Snippet Club Videos ready ... Read more