July AutoHotkey Newsletter
AutoHotkey Newsletter July 20th, 2023
Howdy %Name%,
Imagine you’re trying to drive home and got stuck in a “snow drift”. It’s currently twenty-six degrees however the sun just came out and it is warming up outside.
27 degrees; 28 degrees, 29 degrees…
You’re still stuck. No noticeable changes
30 degrees, 31, Still, nothing!
32 degrees (is something happening? Hurray!)
33 degrees, A one-degree shift, seemingly no different from the temperature increases before it, has begun to unlock a huge change.
“Breakthrough moments” are often the result of many previous actions.
The are a result of built-up potential required to unleash a major change. This pattern shows up everywhere. For example: people with diabetes are often caught off guard that their kidney is failing yet they had years of signs if they new what to look for had they known what to look for.
Similarly, habits (both good and bad) often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance.
Sadly, in the early and middle stages of any goal, people often give-up when they are in the “Ravine of Despondency.”
Humans often expect to make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days. It doesn’t feel like you’re making any headway.
It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed. After spending time & effort our automations surpass the linear relationship we expected and we can finally reach the Zenith of Accomplishment.
In reality, the results of our efforts are often delayed. It is not until months or years later that we realize the true value of the previous work we have done.
This is why I view learning AutoHotkey as an investment. It takes time up front, however, after you get the hang of it, the dividends are life changing❗ Everything you do on a Windows computer can be streamlined!
Now on with the show…
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Cycling through Programs
A while back we made this cools script improving upon one we saw from Teran Van Hemert. In ours, we converted everything to a function so it is easier to adapt for new programs. We demonstrate how to use it in this video.
🔥 Unleash Your Program-Switching Skills! Jump & Toggle with Ease!😲
Easily adjust the brightness of any monitor
This script is a handy one to have at your fingertips! We made a super-simple script that will allow you to easily dim the monitor your mouse is over. You can check it out in this video.
How to Dim a specific Monitor
Learn Basics of SQL
We will often use SQLite to store our data. In this video Isaias gives our most recent team member Irfan (author of Rufaydium) an intro to using the SQLite browser and storing data. BTW- we’re getting close to having Rufaydium available in v2 😊.
🌟 SQL and SQLite Made Easy: Boost Your Data Wizardry! 🎯 tatm
Various ways to store user data with AutoHotkey
While we’re talking about storing data, there are a lot of ways to use AutoHotkey to store data! In this video Isaias and I discuss many different approaches and why you pick one over the other.
the-Automators AHK-talk: Various ways to store data and their uses
Example uses of AutoHotkey
I stumbled upon this AutoHotkey video where he walks through his favorite AHK scripts. If you’re new to AutoHotkey it can give you some good ideas of what can be done however we try and not imitate a human. We try and take API approaches when solving processes.
AutoHotkey – AHK – My fav scripts
Imitating a Human vs. API approach
If my comment above about imitating a human verse taking an API approach isn’t clear, this is a great video that will help you understand the different approaches.
APIs compared to Human Interfaces: How do you use AutoHotkey?
📚 What we’re reading
- How to watch local Video Files on Your Roku
- How to Remove a Partition in Windows 11
- Extreme Productivity Blueprint from Dan Kennedy
- Proton Mail is Fighting Back Against Tracking Links
- YouTube’s Premium’s Price is Going Up ☹❗
🤖 AI / Chat GPT-3 News / Usage
- How to Use ChatGPT to Transform Writing Into Another Format
- Ryan Wells shared this little gem with me which gives a cool infographic of job vulnerability by AI. I grabbed the “juicy” part of the image and put it below.
⚡️Productivity tips: Ctrl + Shift + S
Use Ctrl + Shift + S to save the current document / file with a different name or location.
🤣 A spot of Humor: Is Kramer retarded?
AHK Hero 🦸♂️
AHK Hero 🦸♂️Consider joining the 🦸♀️AHK Hero club! Members receive 25% off courses, consultations, tutoring, done for you project work, etc. They also have access to exclusive & pre-released content and a 3 hours a week where we help people with their AHK issues (the Saturday call is geared towards people new to AutoHotkey.)
🗣️ 💭 Quotable quotes
- Successful people rarely start out As most likely to succeed
- Work first, reward second, in order — Dan Kennedy
- Stop arguing. — John Carlton
- You’ll never change your life until you change your daily routine — Joe Glines
⏩SHARE WITH A FRIEND⏩
⏩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!
Joe, Isaias, Irfan, and staff
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P.S. The intro to the newsletter is a life-changer. Spending time now, to be more efficient later, is something all of us in the AHK Hero group practice. If you want to pick up good habits and learn how others are using AutoHotkey, I highly recommend you click here and join the AutoHotkey hero group.
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AutoHotkey Newsletter July 20th, 2023
One of the deadliest mistakes you can make is…
Getting discouraged and giving up too early.
For the past year, I’ve promoted the AHK hero group.
I’ve mentioned it in many videos, in the Newsletter and during client calls.
At the beginning sign-ups were slow. Even though we offered 3 hours of live support calls (never shared publicly), access to a private Telegram group, and 25% off all our courses and client work, people didn’t want to part with their hard earned moolah.
And I totally understand. It’s hard to sign up for a recurring payment in today’s economy. But some people realized this is an investment in themselves and chose to make the leap. 😁
A year later and we have 89 members (and more joining regularly). So much so I might have to cap it so people can’t join!
Had I thrown in the towel early–on, I would have lost out on and, more importantly, all the clients who enrolled would have missed out on a life-transforming program. People are leveling-up faster and getting more done than they ever thought possible. If I’d stopped the program after a few months I would have done them a huge disservice to them and to myself.
It took over 9 months before we were anywhere near breaking even (and that isn’t counting my time, just for paying for Isaias & Irfan to be there). Now we’re loving the calls and the Telegram group is active with many members helping each other (and learning along the way)
So don’t give up too early on your goals. Make sure you set clear deadlines and keep thinking about what you can do to achieve them! Do your best to track
Now on with the show…
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Level-up your AHK functions
Isaias gave us a great tutorial on how we can simplify function calls by binding a variable to them. This is a great way to simplify complicated functions! Check it out in this video.
You Won’t Believe How Easy It Is to Bind Parameters to a Function in AutoHotkey
Get an idea what I automate with AutoHotkey
A few years back I had a regular series where, every week, I would record a video showing what I automated with AutoHotkey. In this video I show some amazing things… Check it out here. or you can take a look at the playlist here
AutoHotkey automation review (003) | What I automated with AutoHotkey
How is v1 like a Bad Employee?
I was on a team call with Isaias and Irfan listening to them comparing results from v1 and v2.
At one point Isaias said something that made me laugh. We were wondering why v2 was failing on an API call whereas v1 was not.
He was explaining that AHK v1 actually was “failing” but it wasn’t letting you know it while AHK v2 was letting you know.
It made me think that v1 is like a bad employee. It will “hide” it’s failures from you where as v2 is a better employee because it let’s you know when something has gone wrong… 😂
If you’re new to AutoHotkey, you can check out our Intro to AutoHotkey course for v2. If you’ve been using AutoHotkey for a while, you would love our v1➡v2 transition course.
Columbo Demonstrates quick-thinking
I’ve been rewatching Columbo and loved this quick clip where he demonstrates how to think outside the box. I discuss some of the times I’ve come up with solutions and how fun it is.
Columbo cracks it wide open: Lessons from the genious detective🔎
Easily send Snippets of text to any program
We’ve made some updates to our Prompt Assistant tool. In this video we discuss some of the cool features and updates. Prompt Assistant is pretty amazing. You can use Hotkeys or HotStrings to trigger text snippets. You can also easily assign icons to them and structure them in the menus.
We also made it super easy to import/export the menus and their icons.
Prompt Assistant update
📚 What we’re reading
- What Is Google Go on Android?
- Straws Make Drinks Taste Better
- How to Customize Win 11 Right-Click Context Menu
- Dan Kennedy on Extreme Productivity
🤖 AI / Chat GPT-3 News / Usage
- ChatGPT just leveled up big time…
- Google Bard has New Features and Supported Languages
- Top 8 ChatGPT Productivity Tips for Work!
- How to (Temporarily) Add New Knowledge to ChatGPT
⚡️Productivity tips: Windows key + Print Screen
Take a screenshot and save it to the Screenshots folder in your Pictures library
🤣 A spot of Humor:🦃 As God is my witness, I thought Turkey’s could fly…
AHK Hero 🦸♂️
Consider joining the 🦸♀️AHK Hero club! Members receive 25% off courses, consultations, tutoring, done for you project work, etc. They also have access to exclusive & pre-released content and a 3 hours a week where we help people with their AHK issues (the Saturday call is geared towards people new to AutoHotkey.)
🗣️ 💭 Quotable quotes
- It’s better to get started in the wrong direction than not get started; We can fix the direction, we can’t fix not getting started. — Norm Schwarzkopf
- A major reason for procrastination and lack of motivation is vagueness, confusion, and fuzzy minded thinking about what you are trying to do and in what order and for what reason. — Brian Tracy
- Tough times never last, but tough people do❗ — Robert Schuller
- Don’t borrow. Pay as you go. You borrow, you’re a kept man. — 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!
Joe, Isaias, Irfan, and staff
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P.S. The intro story about the AHK Hero program is true. Our members love it and you would too! You can read testimonials here. I highly recommend you sing up today! Who knows if we’ll be letting more people join in coming weeks…
AutoHotkey Newsletter July 13th, 2023
A lot of our focus is how to do things more efficiently so to free-up time. However, by far, the best way to get more time is to just stop doing non-critical things!
I learned this lesson from my mentor, Dr. TK Clarke. He was a midshipman at the Cal Maritime Academy when he was younger. One responsibility all midshipman had was to keep a specifically designated section of brass polished.
He happened to notice that they didn’t go around at regular times and inspect the brass, it was just that an officer would be walking around and notice some “dull brass” and then track down who it was assigned to and discipline them. That’s when a crazy-bold idea hit him, and he decided the risk was worth it.
In the middle of the next day he went to his assigned area with a can of black paint and a paint brush and proceeded to paint over the brass! When asked what he was doing he told them he’d received a crazy order to paint over it. 🤣
So, for several years, he had one less responsibility to do!
I always wonder if the midshipman that replaced him was smart enough to not mention he can’t find the brass that was assigned to him…
So just remember while learning AutoHotkey is a great way to be more productive, another great way to free up time is to just find a way to stop doing things you’re regularly doing!
Now on with the show…
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Quick mention of Amazing tools by GeekDude
We were on a Hero call the other day and GeekDude was helping us understand just how complex programming around time is (here is a great and hilarious video ⌚🤦♂️that he mentioned which is amazing). If you’re not aware, besides the amazing Chrome.ahk library, GeekDude has made many other tools and resources.
In this video we mention 3 that have direct “out of pocket” costs associated with them (due to hosting / registration etc.). If you’re lucky enough to have a few extra bucks, please consider donating to him.
3 Amazing AutoHotkey Services by GeekDude
Saving the Sort order of Open and Save Dialog
A few weeks back, for Ryan Wells birhtday, we created a script I knew he wanted. I also found it annoying but, now that I’m using this tool, I realized just how annoying I found it! Being able to have the Open / Save dialog sorted by recency is really nice! In this video we show 3 ways to achieve this (one of which using Shell Hooks which are awesome)
Open and Save Dialog Sorter
Binding parameters is easy and super helpful!
A few weeks ago, Isaias showed us on a Hero call how easy it was to Bind Parameters to a function in AutoHotkey. This is a GREAT way to simplify calling more complicated scripts. Definitely something we should all be doing (especially when working with DLL calls). Since the Hero group is private, I asked Isaias to give me another quick tutorial on the topic.
You Won’t Believe How Easy It Is to Bind Parameters to a Function in AutoHotkey
Finding a pattern of text (regardless of the order) RegEx Rocks❗
For a client we were looping over emails, grabbing the email body, and isolating information like: Date, price, etc. Isaias realized using a Look Ahead on a Regular Expression is awesome because the order of the patterns you find does NOT matter! I can’t imagine trying to code this w/o RegEx! In this short video Isaias shows us how it works. If you’re new to Regular Expressions, we have a series of short tutorials here or you can check out Jack Dunnings great RegEx book.
Grabbing a date from a string with Regex Look ahead
Customizing Sales emails with Outlook, Excel and AutoHotkey
On a client project we are helping him automate emails to prospects. I showed him how, years ago, I showed how easily this could be done with AutoHotkey. In this video I show how easy it is to customize the email and do a mail-merge functionality.
Easily Automate customized sales emails (2021)
📚 What we’re reading
- Don’t replace your PC, Put an SSD In It (I have this one)
- Keyboard shortcut that Quickly Clears Your Browser History
- Mini PC Is Under $350 and Has 16 GB RAM
- How to Download Files From GitHub
🤖 AI / Chat GPT-3 News / Usage
- ChatGPT just leveled up big time…
- Are you dating? Why not get some good “Pickup Lines” from AI? 😆
- Compilation of what ChatGPT Code Interpreter (thanks Ryan)
⚡️Productivity tips Ctrl + Shift + T
Easily re-open the most recently closed tab in your web browser by hitting Control + Shift + T
🤣 A spot of Humor Ouch that hurt!
AHK Hero 🦸♂️
Consider joining the 🦸♀️AHK Hero club! Members receive 25% off courses, consultations, tutoring, done for you project work, etc. They also have access to exclusive & pre-released content and a 3 hours a week where we help people with their AHK issues (the Saturday call is geared towards people new to AutoHotkey.)
🗣️ 💭 Quotable quotes
- Good leaders don’t make excuses. Instead, they figure out a way to get things done — Jocko Willink
- If you are not ready today, you will be even less so tomorrow — Ovid
- Successful people rarely start out As most likely to succeed
- Don’t wait. The time will never be just right. — Napoleon Hill
⏩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!
Joe, Isaias, Irfan, and staff
| | | | | | |
P.S. The story I mentioned at the beginning of this newsletter is 💯% true. It has saved me unbelievable amounts of time over the years. I highly recommend you pick a few things to stop doing and start spending time on things that will save you time (like learning AutoHotkey)
AutoHotkey Newsletter July 6th, 2023
Ironically, the 2️⃣biggest problems I see with developers and people that sell professional services are:
Basic Problem #1. You’re not cocky enough, and you’re trying to sell from your heels. That means you’re poised to run away at the slightest hint your prospect may not instantly fall head-over-heels-in-love with what you have, or (worse) may be offended by your efforts to actually close the sale.
Basic Problem #2. You’re too cocky. This is a huge problem when your program is full of complicated approaches, and you don’t (or can’t) back it up with proof.
So be bold, but not so much that you can’t fill-up that 10-gallon hat 🤠
Now on with the show…
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Amazing Update to v1️
Both Isaias and I were surprised at the update Lexikos pushed to v1 the other day. Being able to use a For loop when dealing with COM objects is a great add! In this video we discuss this and other bug fixes. Thank you Lexikos for all you do!
BTW- if you’re new to Objects, we have a great course on them
💥 Explosive AutoHotkey v1 Upgrades: Must-See! 😍
Timing is everything!
I’m a huge Columbo fan and, in this short video, the murder demonstrates a great skill to have to make sure things get done. Reminders are important however, if you can’t act when the reminder reminds you, you’ll be out of luck.
Columbo Murder demonstrates great planning skills
Use your Automator Wallet and save 20%
We are doing what we can to provide ways to save y’all money. In this video you can see how to use it. Sadly the 20% discount cannot be used with other discounts. For instance, if you take advantage of my 12 year YouTube anniversary (where you can get 60% off our courses) you would not be able to also get an additional 20% off during checkout. But that 60% discount only has 3 more uses which means, after the early birds get their worms, even sleepy heads can still get 20% off using the wallet.
Introducing the Automator Wallet
Working with Form Data while WebScraping or performing API calls
Lately we’ve been doing a lot of client work that require performing API calls. Sometimes the call you are performing requires “form data”. While I’d used them before, I wasn’t 100% certain about the terminology and what I was doing. In this video Isaias walks me through the terminology and how to use them properly.
What is multipart form data? How to handle it with WinHTTPrequest
Tracking your time in Clockify
We all (probably) know that tracking your time is a very important step to being productive. And, if you’re working for other people, we are often required to break-down where we spent our time. In this video Isaias shows us how he uses Clockify to keep track of the client projects he’s working on.
Tracking your time in Clockify
📚 What we’re reading
- No, Windows Is Not Moving to the Cloud
- How to Customize the Right-Click Context Menu in Windows 11
- How to Clear History in Google Chrome
- Why people are Putting Orange Juice in Coffee (I do this and it is delicious!)
🤖 AI / Chat GPT-3 News / Usage
- 10 Bing Chat AI Features you should be using
- Why Open AI Playground is better than ChatGPT
- 8 ChatGPT AI Alternatives
- Face Search Engine
⚡️Productivity tips: Control+Shift+V in MS Word
When you copy text from one location and want to paste it into another location in a different format, you can use Control+Shift+V. It allows you to paste the text while removing the original formatting and applying the formatting of the destination location.
🤣 A spot of Humor: 50th Anniversary of 🧨🐳
While this is a grizzly topic, the reporter did an amazing job of articulating it!
Exploding Whale 50th Anniversary, Remastered!
AHK Hero 🦸♂️
Consider joining the 🦸♀️AHK Hero club! Members receive 25% off courses, consultations, tutoring, done for you project work, etc. They also have access to exclusive & pre-released content and a 3 hours a week where we help people with their AHK issues (the Saturday call is geared towards people new to AutoHotkey.)
🗣️ 💭 Quotable quotes
- Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is specifically your own — Bruce Lee
- Fact: You have just as much time as: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Thomas Jefferson & Einstein. It’s all about prioritizing & staying focused — Joe Glines
- Recognizing a problem is half the success in solving it — Sigmund Freud
- Go the extra mile. Even when no one does it for you. — 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!
Joe, Isaias, Irfan, and staff
| | | | | | |
P.S. At the time I’m sending this email there are still 3 more uses for the 60% off discount to our courses. Don’t forget we offer a 200% money back guarantee on our courses. If you’re not thrilled about your purchase within the first 30 days we will pay you double what you paid for the course!
