Hello everybody and welcome to episode number 32 of That's A Freebie, titled "Now In Technicolor".

Why in Technicolor, you think? You've probably guessed already. It's because we... I say we, I always say we.

I am now available in YouTube, full-on video. So this is going to be the very first episode.

That I publish the whole video for. And I am a little bit nervous about it, but I've been recording video now for the last three episodes.

This is the before actually. So I'm pretty confident that it's fine to go on YouTube.

And again, it's an audio first podcast. I'm not recording specifically for YouTube.

The camera's pointed at me. I'll probably be looking at my screen most of the time.

I am trying to look at the camera more often. I'm doing it right now. Hi, everyone.

But I...

I will be trying to still centre around audio. Video is going to be an afterthought I suppose.

So yeah, we're going to see how that goes.

I did want to actually just have a little shoutout this week for the website, which is thatsafreebie.com.

The reason for that is you can send me questions, you can contact me on...

all of the social medias that are on there, which social media I'm on, but basically I am thatsafreebie on all of them.

And the reason I am asking you this is just so you can send me questions.

Things to probably open the podcast with. I'm thinking of trying to start opening the podcast with a listener question each week.

So let's see how that goes. I've had a few. I've been building them up.

So if you have sent a question, I'm sorry I haven't answered it yet. I will be answering it.

I was just building up stuff.

do a few in a row. I should probably have replied and told you that, but hey, I didn't. I'm telling you now. So yes, that would be great if you could send a list of questions. And yeah, it's been a

fairly quiet week this week. There's not much happened. Trying to think where to start, really.

Why don't I start with an update on my weight? Because I have been asked by...

a few people, because I did promise an update, didn't I, at the end of... I think I said the end of January or the beginning of January. I can't quite remember now. Either way, I didn't do it. And it's because I was, like I said previously, I was done with January. I was completely happy to forget that January didn't exist and start again in February. We are now in February. So now would be the time to start. I did a weigh-in this morning and I was actually really surprised because.

I haven't been doing anything specific over then watching what I eat.

Uh, so I've been trying to eat less bad stuff.

Essentially.

I've had less fast food, uh, all that kind of stuff.

And, uh, my weight came in at two Oh 5.7 pounds.

So it was nowhere near as high as I was expecting.

I was almost expecting everything to have gone back to the start and be having to start again.

Um, but it didn't.

So that was good.

To see, I am going to do the regular way.

It's I'm going to aim for the beginning of every month.

So maybe the first episode of each month, I'll try and do a way in and we'll see how it goes.

Uh, I'm going back to continuing to just eat, uh, more healthy.

Um, I've started making sure I take my lunch to work every day instead of going to, well,

whatever's available, usually McDonald's to be honest, I used to eat it nearly every day.

Uh, I've got a lot better at that over the last few months.

So things are looking up there.

Um, hence probably why I haven't put on a ton of weights.

I've just maintained where I was at just through normal, uh, eating

and not doing anything additional.

Uh, I am going to go back to the intermittent fasting.

Uh, what I'm going to do, I'm going to do intermittent fasting on the days that I'm working.

So if it's my day off, I'm not going to do it on that day.

Um, I just feel like it worked better when I did that.

I sort of naturally fell into that the last time I was doing it.

So I'm probably going to keep it that way.

Uh, so yeah, little weights update for you.

And I do, I just read it in the thing.

I'd actually forgotten about this.

I do have a, another story of a dumb thing that I did.

Uh, this one was actually this week.

I, uh, I actually completely forgot when I'd added it to the rundown.

Uh, I just saw it then.

So anyway, yeah.

This week I went for lunch with a friend.

stuff to do and decided, why don't we get some lunch while we're doing it?

So we, we went for lunch.

Now, it was absolutely like hammering it down.

It was, it was one of the rainiest days I've seen in a long, long time.

Um, and so I was soaked, absolutely drenched, and I'd had to wait for my friend for about half an hour.

Not the friend's fault, my fault.

I arrived early.

I always do.

I arrive early to everything.

Uh, so I was about half an hour early.

So I basically had to stand in the rain waiting.

I tried to find shelter.

I did find shelter eventually, so it wasn't too bad, but I was already soaked by this point.

Hadn't taken a coat with me.

All I had was, um, actually this hoodie.

Uh, I was wearing this hoodie.

Uh, now that I think about it and drenched, absolutely drenched.

So that meant I needed a pee and I needed a pee really badly.

Um, so we basically, I'm like, as soon as I saw it, I was like, right, I need a pee.

But there was nowhere to go because.

We essentially, we would go into the bank, uh, we were closing an account down, uh, we went to the bank and it took about half an hour to 40 minutes in there the whole time I'm like, I'm dancing up and down.

I'm like, Oh, neither way. I need a way I couldn't go anywhere because it needed my signature and I needed my signature several times throughout the process. So it's a bit like, um, right. Okay. So I just had to hold.

Anyway, we decided to go to the, there's a pub right in the corner. We decided to go there for lunch and.

So we got there and I, by this point, I'm at the point where I could probably have peed myself and I wouldn't have noticed. Like I, there's a chance I did for all I know. I mean, I didn't, I was still bursting, but you know, a little bit of weed might have come out. It's possible.

Um, so I burst into the pub, I've run through the door, I looked around, I couldn't see the toilets. I've never been in this place before. It's completely foreign town to me. I've never even been to this place.

So I ran around the pub looking for the toilets and I couldn't find it. And I got back to the door.

And I was like, where's the toilet? Where's the toilet? And she said, it's just there. If you'd have asked me, I would have shown you where it is. I come here all the time. I was like, ah, okay. So I, um, I was running up to the toilet, I swung the door open and there's two doors and they're identical.

And I was like, oh no. So I just, I just went for the first door, pulled the first door, ran straight through it to go into the toilet, realized very quickly I was outside.

I found some sort of door to the outside. So I was like, ah, turned around, went to run back in just as the door closed and it's locked.

It must have had one of those magnetic locks on it. I was like, oh no. So I'm starts pushing the door. I was like, I was thinking it can't be locked because I was able to open it from the other side.

Like I didn't press anything or do anything. I was able to open it and I'm pulling the door and pulling the door. I wasn't actually, I was pushing the door and I couldn't get in.

turned around to try and work out how the hell to get out of this place because it.

I was in, I'm assuming, like the back area of the pub and it was fenced off. So I was a bit like,

I don't know, I'm going to get out of here. I'm kind of stuck. And I'd left my phone with my friend because I dumped my bag when I ran. So anyway, I pushed the door a couple of times and somebody must have been walking past it. They opened it. And I went, "Thanks." I just run past them. Went into the other door, which was obviously the toilet, went to the toilet. Anyway, when I When I came out, I had to look at the door, had one of those, um, key.

Code pads on, um, it just wasn't have been shot properly the first time or something like that.

I don't know.

Uh, but yeah, the, uh, the person who let me in, I think was an employee and was probably looking at me the whole time thinking, what the hell are you doing back here?

But yeah.

So yeah, so much stupid that I did this week.

It's weirdly becoming a regular segment, um, which never was meant to be the, uh, the case,

but hey, if I do stupid stuff, I do stupid stuff, right?

Like I said, it's been a fairly quick.

Quiet week this week, not much more has happened other than that really.

I've been poorly, so I've not really been anywhere or gone anywhere or done anything for that matter.

Wow.

Yeah.

I love to sleep.

So in that vein, let's move on to the AI question of the week.

I like this week's AI question.

It was a hard one to choose an answer to.

The question is, if you had to live in a movie universe for a week, which one would you choose?

character would it be?

And importantly, how would you use your movie character's skills or powers in your everyday life?

I really toyed with this, but I think the answer's got to be clear I suppose really.

I decided that I would want to live in the Harry Potter universe because magic, right? I wouldn't want to be one of the characters from Harry Potter, I would want to just be me in the Harry

And I think that's allowed within the boundaries of the question.

I know it says what character would you want to be, but it doesn't specifically say you've got to be one of the characters from the show.

So the show, the movie, although I hear it's going to be a show eventually.

Who knows?

So I would yeah, I would absolutely love to live within the Harry Potter universe

to just just have magic around all the time, I think would be great.

I think if I was to do any.

Job in that world, I would probably.

Want to be an aura, which is, I suppose, their version of the police.

Yeah, I think that's what I would like to do.

Catching bad wizards, people doing wrong, all that kind of stuff.

I think it'd be great. And yeah.

So tell me what you think.

What what what what fictional universe would you like to live in and what would you do?

The next tip of the week, I think, is probably going to resonate with a lot

of people, as most of them do, I suppose.

It's not nothing groundbreaking, but this one is.

Well, it got me this week and it is parking tickets.

Yeah, I got a parking ticket this week on that same trip.

I was just talking about where I nearly peed myself.

I was told by the friend, oh, park on the leisure centre car park.

It's free for three hours.

You don't have to pay for it and it's fine.

We all do it all the time.

So I was like, OK,

bear in mind, it's absolutely chucking it out.

So I couldn't see, get to the leisure centre, drives into the car park, thought.

Lovely, it's a nice big car park, but it was rammed,

so I drove around until I found a space and eventually.

I saw some coming out of a space,

I thought, right, well, I'm in that space.

So I drove down straight into the space and I was fine.

I had to look around.

I wanted to have a look at the signage.

The signage did say it's free for three hours.

And he also did actually say that you could leave the site, which is a bit unusual.

You don't normally see that, do you?

So I think it was more of a public car park that happens to be next to the leisure

centre and it's just known as the leisure centre car park by the sound of it.

So that's what I thought.

You see where this is going, I think.

We went and did our thing,

eat, peed myself, came back just as I'm about to set up.

Again, it's still belting it down.

The rain is just, I couldn't see it was so bad.

I had to take my glasses off because they were just full of water.

So I got in the car.

I sat there for a bit with the heater on because the windows had all steamed up

I slowly but surely asked the steam rose from the windscreen.

I could see a little yellow square on the corner of the car.

So I was looking at it thinking, is that a parking ticket?

And then I honestly for a second thought to myself,

I ain't getting out and getting it, I'm just going to leave it there.

And if it's still there when I get home, great.

But then I thought, no, I better not do that.

And so eventually I got back out the car, got back in the car.

And yeah, sure enough, it was a parking ticket.

And I opened it up and it said for parking in a designated area without a permit.

So I was looking, I could not find anything that said it was a designated area.

Anyway, eventually I drove around the car park a few times.

And again, it was chucking it down.

And there's basically one green sign at the start of this part of the car park.

And it does say it's designated parking only for the leisure center.

You have to have a permit to park there.

So I did it wrong.

but this side was very clearly small.

And all of the other sides for the car park, there was no other indication whatsoever that the area was for permits only, there was nothing on the floor, there was no different colouring of the bays or anything like that, the things that they usually do to show you that it's designated parking.

And the side was, it was big, but it wasn't as big as all the other sides. It's funny because all of the other sides were high up, the side for this designated area was low down.

And you're looking around, you don't see it, especially in that kind of rain. And also, there were two entrances to this area of the car park, and only one of them had a sign on it. So I'm going to contest it, see what happens.

If I don't get, if it don't do it, I'll have to pay, it's fine. It's £35 if I pay within two weeks. So you'll probably find out by next week, if I ended up paying it or not.

But yeah, gripe of the week, parking tickets, just in general, because often you don't get a parking ticket because you did something wrong on purpose.

ticket because it's not very clear what is what's required.

This week's pick of the week may actually have

almost been spoiled by me last week. Now, if you remember last week, the pick of the week was

Deaf Stranding for the Mac, because it's available on Mac now. It actually came out,

I think yesterday, I've not played.

It yet. I've downloaded it but not played it yet. I haven't a time that's probably next on the agenda for today. Actually, I think I might play for a little bit and the reason it might have been spoil is you may have heard last week that I mentioned something called a Tony box in the same section as the the pick of the week is because that's what my pick of the week was going to be originally.

However.

No, that's not what happened at all, I'm talking rubbish.

I got a little bit, I got a week ahead basically in the recording, so I was, well I am currently a week ahead of recording.

So I realised Death Stranding was coming out and essentially the reason I was doing it was because it was cheaper if you bought it, I wanted to let people know.

But I realised whilst recording that pick of the week that

it will all already have been released and be past that date by the time the episode comes out.

So I did it all, I did the whole recording and as I was doing a little bit of editing, cutting out the,

essentially cutting out all the silences where I stop and think about what I'm going to say,

I realised I was talking about something that would already have been released and you wouldn't be able to actually take advantage of the cheaper price.

So I had to chop out the pick of the week from one episode and then move it to the other episode.

And that's actually the reason why I haven't done the video over the last two weeks.

Because I was wearing different clothes in two different parts on two different videos.

So I was like, oh, that'll be too confusing to explain. I'll just wait till I get to the point where I'm doing the Tony box.

So this week, the pick of the week is something called a Tony box.

That's T-O-N-I-E. I ain't going to cut this part out.

I ain't going to move it to a different thing because there's no more restrictions on release dates and things like that.

And that's why it was funny. I wondered if anybody noticed, nobody mentioned it. So you probably didn't notice. And I'm probably doing myself a disservice by telling you what, what I had to do. But like I've always said, I just want to be completely honest and tell you guys exactly how this thing works because it's all a learning curve. Right. So yeah, I, this week I'm picking the Tony box, the Tony box,

I will link a, to the website in the show notes. But it's basically a box, a square box. Well, actually it's not a square box. It's a cube. And it's

not even that big. I should have brought one down and could have shown it on the video, but you'll see it on the website.

It's fine. And we bought them for our kids about, oh, good grief, maybe five or six years ago. They've had them for a really long time. It might even be longer than that, to be truthful. And basically, it's a story box. And what you do, you buy little figurines for it. And the figurines are like there's a the jibs of the giant peach.

There's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There's Lilo and Stitch. I'm trying to think of all the ones. They've got loads of them. And they're essentially little characters.

They're the characters from the story. And they've got the Lion King. Loads of them.

They must have about 15 or 20 of them each, because over the years we've bought them.

They're not that expensive, really. And it's a story. So you put the character on top of the box, and it sends a code to the box, and it tells it which story it is. It downloads the story over over the internet and then it plays it.

control what's being played by just putting the different characters on top of the box.

The box is padded. It's really, really good. We've got absolutely got our money's worth out of it.

I think if I remember rightly, they were about 70 pounds to buy when we first bought them.

That's each. We bought them for their birthdays one year. So one got one,

actually one got one for Christmas and then we thought it was so good that we got the next,

we got another one for the birthday because originally we were only going to buy one and we realized very quickly that they both are going to be...

want different stories and the like. And we just buy them a new story for every couple of months.

They go to bed at night and they put a story on and they listen to it and they either fall asleep in the boy's case or listen to the entire story in the girl's case because she doesn't sleep.

And it's absolutely worth the money. If you've got young children who like stories, which pretty much all young children like stories, right? It's definitely worth investing your money in. You can You can even guess.

specific Tony headphones that pair to the box so they can listen with headphones if they want to as well.

It's really good.

They can rewind and fast forward by tilting the box or tapping it on its side and things like that.

They play and pause and all that.

It does like motion controls.

I don't think they even know they do that because they've never done that.

They just sat on a shelf on the side of the bed, they put the story on they want at night and then when they're ready to go to sleep, they just take the story off and it stops and then you put the story back on the day after and it carries on where it left off.

It really is amazing.

So yeah, you should absolutely check it out.

There will be a link in the show notes.

Have a look at it because it's, I wouldn't say it's a life saver if you've got children,

but it's hours upon hours of entertainment.

Should still read them a story though, because that is really good bonding time.

So read them a story, then let them have a Tony.

You may recall last week that I asked you the question, would you rather?

I got hiccups said, would you rather go invisible or read minds there?

I, at first I thought read minds, but the more I think about it, the more I don't want to know what people are thinking that that could lead you down a bad path.

I think like, just think about all the obtrusive thoughts that you have throughout the day.

everybody does it's completely natural it's just

a thing that happens you you can't tell yourself that a thought is a bad thought without having it in the first place you know it's the obtrusive thoughts don't necessarily mean it's something that you want to do but it does mean that you've got to have thought it to sort it so that you know it's filed away as that's not something that is in my remit it's not something that I would do or not something I want to say that kind of thing so I decided I would rather go invisible

Out of the two, I think it's the most...

useless power. Like, reading minds is probably far more useful, but if you remember, you couldn't turn it off, the reading of the minds. So I think I would definitely prefer to have the ability to go invisible rather than read minds. Imagine being able to just get on with your day without anybody hassling you. That sounds great to me. So yeah, go invisible. But building on that, I have

done like a little follow-up question this week. So this week's question to end the show with...

Would you rather be able to go invisible or teleport?