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Archive by category "AutoHotkey Newsletter"

Cameras Didn’t Kill Art. They Set It Free. 🎨📷 News 2026-10-01

Howdy,

I just watched David Heinemeier Hansson’s opening keynote at Rails World. DHH created Ruby on Rails, and holy cow, DHH is FIRED UP about AI. 🚀

But what grabbed me first wasn’t the AI part. It was a story about Artists.

Back in the 1700s, getting your portrait done meant sitting for hours in front of a master painter, then waiting months for the finished piece. Only the rich and royal could afford it.

In 1886, Danish painter Laurits Tuxen spent THREE YEARS on one painting of the royal family.

Then in 1900, Kodak released the Brownie camera. It cost about a dollar, and suddenly regular people could get their picture taken.

Imagine being a portrait painter back then. Your whole career was capturing people as realistically as possible… and a one-dollar box just did it faster and at a fraction of the price.

That had to be the end of art, right?

It turns out it was the opposite ❗

Painters stopped trying to copy reality and started exploring. Picasso chased Cubism. Tuxen and the Skagen painters moved toward Impressionism.

We got an EXPLOSION of creativity 👀

Because the old job went away and artists had to find new ways to express themselves.

Sound familiar?

DHH sees the same thing happening right now with AI.

Last November, AI coding tools got good enough that people could build real software just by describing it. DHH hasn’t written code by hand in months and is more productive (and happier) than ever.

The advice: don’t mourn the old way. Look back on it with joy, then get excited about what’s next.

A line DHH first used back in 2005 fits better than ever: “Look at all the things I’m not doing.”

How about you? Are you looking at AI like a painter staring at the first camera? Or like a painter who just got permission to try something completely new?

I’ll leave you with DHH‘s energy, because I share it.

Every dream, every annoyance, every “someday” idea is now within reach❗

I’m with DHH on this one. 🤖⚡

BTW: If you don’t have an hour to spare for his entire speech, I made this video with NotebookLM capturing many of his ideas.

Now on with the show…

Access all our Courses; Quit when you want

Stop Paying Hosting Fees for your Website

I was having an interesting discussion with Claude the other day and it mentioned this fascinating way to host an incredibly safe, lightning fast website for free.

You can read the detailed plan here or watch this video to get the concept.

Stop Paying Monthly Website Fees Forever 💰

Discussing more about Jev

During our Hero call last week we had a great discussion about using Jev.

Having a background in Marketing Research and having developed questionnaires for ~20 years, I had some interesting insights on how to better use the tool.

Check it out in this video.

How Jev is different than other LLMs and how to use it correctly

Using AI to Clean-up Audio

Ffmpeg is an incredible tool❗ We use it as the foundation of a lot of our tools that work with Audio/video. It has built-in functionality to “clean” your audio (removing hum, voice leveling, etc.), which is handy. However, in this video I demonstrate how superior AI is at cleaning up noise.

I also covered removing audio hum with FFmpeg and AI tools in an earlier Hero extract if you want to see more.

If you’re interested, check out ClearCut here.

Comparing AI Audio Filters to FFmpeg Options | Hero Extract

Some Brilliant AI Debugging Agent Tips 👀

During a hero call Isaias walks us through his incredible AI strategy for developing code and debugging. This video is an amazing peek into a very advanced approach for using AI.

You don’t want to miss this one❗

AI Context Hacks for Smarter Debugging 💡 | Hero Extract

Improving People’s Lives: Story #116

Today I helped myself❗

I’ve been writing this newsletter for 6 years now.

Every week I open my Newsletter template file, write an intro, then navigate to the relevant folder (organized by Year\Month) and save it for the respective Thursday.

This of course means I need to know which Thursday it is, and it forces me to type out the date.

Today I asked Claude to generate blank template files in the folders for me up through 2028.

For example, for October 8^th it created 2026-10-08-xxxxx.docx

Now, when I write that newsletter I’ll still start with my Newsletter template, then navigate to October’s folder and save it over that file (and will replace the xxxxx with the topic)

This will save me about 1.5 minutes each week (for the next 117 weeks) but I’ll put that time to good use. You can count on that❗ (baby steps to freedom)

📚 What we’re reading

How to stop your Android phone from checking location 500+ times daily
This forgotten SATA trick made my cheap old SSD feel brand new
I’ve used PuTTY for years, but this open-source SSH app replaced my 3-tool setup

🤖 AI News that you Need to Know

Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 5.5
OpenAI launches GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna
Ollama 0.35.0 adds “decision models” for local classification

⚡️Productivity tips: The “Not Now” list

When an unrelated idea pops up, write it down instead of acting on it.

This preserves the idea without letting it hijack your current task.

🤣 A spot of Humor: Some pretty funny scares here…

What we 🅰utomated this week with AutoHotkey #150

I recorded this one from Vegas, and it was a busy week❗

I show you Jev, a little AI tool that picks the right program from a list and tells you how confident it is.

I also show AutoHotkey versions of my Wi-Fi repair and PC health check tools, a Gemini voice tool that generates podcast-style conversations, and a Nemotron diarizer that labels speakers in long recordings right on your own PC.

In this week’s video I walk you through all of them, along with a personal info scrubber, some Rust fuzzy search benchmarks that blow pure AHK out of the water, and a macro recorder built on UIA.

Clients say…

Joe! All I can say is WOW! — Stephanie Holland

AHK Hero 🦸

Consider joining the 🦸Hero club! Members receive 25% off courses, consultations, tutoring, done for you project work, etc. Currently we have over 613 hours of recordings teaching AutoHotkey that is exclusive to Hero members❗

During this Friday’s call we’re planning to discuss:

Help Hero Members with their Questions & Code
Hosting your website for free
AHK Tools
- TextUnderMouse Now gets paths & code
- WatchFolders example
- Jev Decider Example (Local and API Call)
- USP Coach
- Fix My Internet
- Monitor Layout
- WebP lib
- PC Health Check
- PC Setup
- Personal Info Scrubber
- Prevent Wake
- Windows Tracer
- vRam Monitor / prog Killer
- Issue with cjson lib for v2 beta❓
LLM
- New Diarizer from Nvidia: Nemotron 3 – reverse approach
- New AI models: Sonnet 5.5, Jev, Astra, Grok 4.7

They also have access to exclusive & pre-released content and 3 hours a week where we help people with their automation issues (the Saturday calls are geared towards people new to Automation with AI)

🗣️ 💭 Quotable quotes

If you have time to whine then you have time to find a solution — Dee Dee Artner
The essentials of happiness are to have something: to do, to love, to hope for, to be needed for— Joe Glines
Tip twenty percent. If you’ve never worked in a job where you had to be nice to rude people, tip even more. You won’t start a trend, but you will make someone’s day and generate good karma — John Carlton

⏩SHARE WITH A FRIEND⏩

Do you know someone that would benefit from learning useful automation tips like the gems in today’s issue? Take a second and forward this newsletter and bask in the glow of their undying gratitude. Was this email forwarded to you?

Sign up for this Newsletter here. We never share your email with anyone. Ever!

the-Automator Dedicated to Multiplying your Income

Joe, Isaias, Irfan and staff

P.S. The intro mentioned David Heinemeier Hansson’s video.

It’s an hour long but I highly recommend you watch the entire thing. It was wonderful❗ (thanks for sharing it @Thomas)

Nobody Wants a Quicker Version of the Job they Hate News 2026-09-24

Howdy %Name%,

Are you selling an improvement, or an opportunity?

Here’s the word that cost me lots of money: faster.

“This script will make your reports faster.”
“This macro will speed up your data entry.”
“Automate this and you’ll cut the time in half.”

Every one of those is true. Every one of those is a losing pitch.

Because the second you say “faster,” you’ve invited a comparison. Faster than WHAT?

Faster than the Excel macro they wrote in 2019. Faster than the VBA thing the last consultant built. Faster than the software they already bought and never rolled out.

They’ve got a Dropbox full of “faster.”

They’ve paid for it more than once.

So they’re not pricing YOUR offer. They’re pricing their own disappointment with the last three things that promised the same thing. And they finished doing that before you got through your first sentence.

Improvement is priced against memory. That’s the whole problem.

What “new“ sounds like instead

Now watch what happens when the pitch isn’t faster, it’s something they’ve never had at all.

Not: “This will speed up your reporting.” Instead: “Your reports will be sitting in your inbox before you get to the office, and you’ll never open that spreadsheet again.“

Not: “Automate your data entry.” Instead: “You’ll stop being the person who does data entry.“

Not: “Learn AutoHotkey to save time.” Instead: “You’ll build the tools nobody else at your company can build.“

Same underlying work. Completely different animal.

There’s no receipt for that second version. Nothing in their history to hold it up against, and no scar tissue attached to it.

That’s why “new” commands prices “faster” never will. Not because the code is harder or takes longer to write. Because there’s nothing in their memory for the price to anchor to.

Nobody lies awake at night wanting a slightly quicker version of the job they already hate.

They lie awake wanting OUT of it❗

Most of us write the “faster” pitch anyway, because it feels safer and more believable and more honest. And because it’s what every other automation guy is saying.

Start with what your market is desperate to BECOME, then build the offer backward from there.

Now on with the show…

The AI tool you didn’t know you needed

Jev is an amazing new AI tool that lets you get answers to closed-ended questions.

It’s a total game changer! Now you can get quick answers to your questions.

It’s already in OpenRouter.ai and I updated our OpenRouter class to let you use it easily.

Check it out in this video.

Jev is the Lightning Fast AI Reasoning You Need

Converting a Picture into an App for a Restaurant

A few months back I took a print menu for a local place and converted it to an app for them (but I didn’t record the process.)

So when I decided to repeat the process I hit record…

In this video you can watch me convert a photo of a menu into a working Progressive Web App using Claude in a bit over 30 minutes.

Truly an amazing world we live in❗

AI Turns Menu Photo Into App in Minutes

Making my own StreamDeck

Speaking of PWAs, in this video I showed how I re-created a Stream Deck that will work if my phone/device is on the same network. If you have an old Android or iPhone sitting around, you can easily use your phone as a “remote control” for your PC.

Progressive Web App Turns Phone Into Stream Deck | Hero Extract

Automating Editing Videos

In this video Kenneth, a Hero Member, demonstrates his custom AutoHotkey tool that helps him identify viral clips to extract from his podcasts.

It used to take him ½ a day to edit a video. Now he takes ½ an hour❗

His tool also suggests b-roll imagery and makes the edits for him.

We also outline some additional ideas to improve his tool.

AI Editor Automates Podcast Clips Into TikToks | Hero Extract

Reducing the Length of your Media

To go a different direction on media files I created MediaShrinker.

This tool is built to let you get through long video/audio files quicker by two main tricks:

Removing silence
Letting you change the playback speed

It’s amazing how much shorter you can make a video by using this tool❗

In this video I show how the tool works and show how it shrank one file by 63%.

Shorten Your Videos Up To 63 Percent by removing Silence and Speeding up Playback

Improving People’s Lives: Story #115

While working on a client’s project I realized she was manually assigning gender to people based on their names and voice. I had these files which contain 101,338 first names and the likely gender associated with them. So, in a couple of minutes, we had used a program to guess their gender (but still let the client override it if she wants to.)

What we’re reading

How to use WinGet commands to keep Windows bloat free
Cool features hiding in your car’s USB port
Android’s private DNS feature solves a problem most people don’t know they have

AI News that you Need to Know

It took me ~ 3 minutes to set up an AI bot to call me using Bland.ai
Setting Grok Bot loose on procurement
Jev is the AI that can’t talk back

Why Developers Are Losing Their Minds Over AI That Can’t Write

⚡️Productivity tips:

Do one thing until finished and don’t allow any interruptions until then.

A spot of Humor: Great Tribute to the Comedian’s Comedian

A Tribute To Sean Lock

What we utomated this week with AutoHotkey #149

I cloned my own voice this week, and I’m planning to do the same for family members to help support their memory down the road.

I also pushed ~12 more web apps live on DirtSimple.app that run entirely in your browser with nothing uploaded anywhere, fixed a nasty OGG length bug in MediaMerger during a six hour transcription run, and taught TextUnderMouse to point at any control and hand you back a working AutoHotkey script.

In this week’s video I walk you through all of it, including the icon animator with 30 styles and a 101,338 First name database I mentioned earlier that figures out Mr. or Ms. on its own.

What we Automated this week #149

Clients say…

How can I pay more for this? — Kelly Coughlin

AHK Hero

Consider joining the Hero club! Members receive 25% off courses, consultations, tutoring, done for you project work, etc. Currently we have over 611 hours of recordings teaching AutoHotkey that are exclusive to Hero members❗

During this Friday’s call we’re planning to discuss:

Help Hero Members with their Questions & Code
Making phone calls with bland.ai
Using Grok Bot
AHK Tools
- TextUnderMouse Now gets paths & code
- IconAnimator – Syntax Writer & Caption changer

Rust Tools
- Virtual Camera
- Using the Rust DLL with AutoHotkey
- Duplicate File Finder

Progressive Web Apps DirtSimple.app
LLM
- Local version of JEV (evaluates images)
- New Diarizer from Nvidia: Nemotron 3 with up to 8 speakers with overlapping speech
- New AI models: Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, Jev, GPT-6 SOL/Luna & Solar Mini 4, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Grok 4.7, GLM 5.3

They also have access to exclusive & pre-released content and 2 hours a week where we help people with their automation issues.

️ Quotable quotes

Systems let the Ordinary do the Extraordinary — Joe Glines
You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction — George Lorimer
It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about? — Henry David Thoreau

⏩SHARE WITH A FRIEND⏩

Sign up for this Newsletter here. We never share your email with anyone. Ever!

the-Automator Dedicated to Multiplying your Income

Joe, Isaias, Irfan and staff

P.S. If you’re still selling “faster” consider trying to change your positioning statement to “new“.

I bet you’ll be able to ask for larger margins and face less push-back.

Kenneth Heard the Crashes Every Week. Then Silence for 10 Years

Howdy,

During a call a few weeks back, Kenneth, an AHK Hero member, mentioned a fascinating story about where he lived in Norway.

There was an intersection that was extremely accident-prone, with a serious accident roughly once a week.

The accidents weren’t minor fender-benders. He specifically describes them as serious T-bone collisions. So bad that he could hear the crash and would call the ambulance.

Eventually, the intersection was converted into a roundabout.

After that, even though he lived there for another ten years, he never heard another crash❗

Some of today’s high-tech designs seem “better” yet they often cause more problems than they’re worth.

Often our clients will get tired of dealing with the hassle and hire us to “re-engineer” the system.

You see, well designed systems let the ordinary do the extraordinary.

Do you have a “crashing intersection” with your software❓

Book a call with us and we can create a roundabout for you!

Now on with the show…

How bad does your Code Smell❓

I was working with AI and suggested an edit and Claude told me it would make my “code smell”.

I had no idea what it was referring to so I asked it to explain it.

I then went to Google Notebook and created this video to help explain the term to everyone!

How “Code Smells” Warn of Hidden Software Rot ⚠️

Quickly Save and Share your Location

Seems like “forever ago” but I think PinMySpot was the first Progressive Web App that I made.

It lets you quickly mark your location and then find it again (or share it with others).

Check it out in this video.

And don’t forget this is just one of 28 free (for now) apps I have at DirtSimple.app

AI Built Location Saving PWA on Phone | Hero Extract

Easily Brand Your Videos

Many years ago I created WaterMarker for quickly and easily adding a watermark to your video.

Recently I “jazzed it up some” which you can see in this video.

Last week I had extra Fable bandwidth so I converted it to a WASM tool which you can currently access for free here.

Easy Way to Add Transparent Watermarks 💧

Improving People’s Lives: Story #114

Yesterday I connected my GrokBot to Treg.to and asked it to pull contact info for managers/owners of the 1,407 companies that are members of our local Chamber of Commerce.

I’m not going to lie. Grokbot made this so easy I actually felt a bit guilty. I think I spent a couple of dollars but got over 1,204 contacts that I can load as a “custom audience” in Facebook and target them with ads.