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Posts tagged "AutoHotkey News" (Page 4)

AHK News 2024-10-31 When I dressed as Big Bird & took San Francisco by storm

Happy Halloween %Name%,

I was just thinking about my Halloween adventure when dressed up as Big-Bird.

I (mostly) grew up ~30 minutes north of San Francisco in Novato, CA.

When I was 18 I rented a “big bird” costume and had plans to out to party.

Somehow my sister convinced me to first go to “Castro Street” in San Francisco (which was supposedly a wild Halloween experience).

Growing up so close to San Francisco made me very aware of, but not afraid of, gay men.

We got to Castro street and let me tell you; it was insane!
There were probably 200 to 300 THOUSAND people! And guess what?

Apparently Big bird is a “favorite” character for gay men!

So I literally had hundreds of men running up and hugging me insisting they get their picture taken with Big bird.

After what seemed like forever we left and hit “Baxters” a nightclub on the way home.

Even though I was under-age (drinking age was 21) the bouncers were also a fan of Big Bird and let me walk right in where I danced the night away.

This was ~37 years ago so, sadly, I don’t have any pictures of the event. I did find this one which my father took before I went out that evening.

So what’s your craziest / most intersting Halloween story❓

Now on with the show…

The Future of Automating your PC

Over the weekend Isaias and I were playing with Computer Use from Anthropic. I don’t love their implementation, but it is a good start (we’ll try and create a video on it soon).

While I hate “image search” approaches, with AI driving the search, it becomes like a “fuzzy match” because, with the Claude implementation, they have it recheck if what they tried to trigger actually happened. And, if they didn’t achieve their goal, the try another way.

This is great however we know of 19 ways to automate the PC with AutoHotkey. Image search & mouse click/sending keystrokes is, by far, the slowest and least accurate.

Isaias and I are planning to create our own “implementation” object and teach Claude several of the other approaches (Like sending control clicks, Post messages, COM, etc.)

But after I finished with Isaias had another very inciteful idea as to how we can get better results from AI. In this video I walk through my new methodology which should really help us get far better results out of AI tools.

The future of Automating your PC

Setting up Computer Use by Claude

Tomorrow morning (Friday November 1^st) AHK hero members are invited to join us for a “pre-hero call”. Thirty minutes before our normal call (we have 2 hours on Fridays from 10-noon CDT) we are going to demonstrate how to install Docker and download and configure the “Computer Use” image from Anthropic. Unlike most AHK hero calls, we will be sharing the recording on YouTube (but only Hero members get to be there and ask questions).

AI Summary tool is Really Helpful

I’m really loving our AI summarize & extraction tool. We haven’t released it yet but I cranked out this short video to help demonstrate how it works.

Check out our Amazing AI Summary tool

Great Dev Trick to Save Time & Reduce Frustration

Here’s a game-changing dev trick: Creating virtual drive mappings.

By conjuring custom drive letters, I can teleport between projects instantly and keep my file paths perfectly synchronized across all my PCs.

It’s like having a secret network of shortcuts that makes path management feel less like a chore and more like wielding developer superpowers!

You can check it out in this video

Creating Fake Drives for easy access & Identical paths across computers

Improving People’s Lives: Story#23

Pre-Covid I used to visit my father in Las Vegas very regularly. Close to where he lived was a small Italian restaurant. I enjoyed their food so much I got to be friends with the owner and offered to help with his marketing/business.

One simple thing we did was automate looping over his emails extracting the locations of his deliveries over the past year.

I then “geo-coded” them (which means I converted each address to a Latitude & Longitude) then I created a few drive-time zones around his location.

He found it incredibly helpful to understand where his customers lived and adjusted his mailers accordingly.

For the “average person” this seemed like an impossible task however, for a Data scientist & automation guru, it took about 1 hour. The best part was the payment!

I got paid in Calzones❗

What we’re reading

9 tips for Perfect Excel Printouts
How Hard Refresh Your Web Browser to bypass your cache
How to Android’s Theft Protection feature

AI / Chat GPT-3 News / Usage

Kolors Virtual Try-On
How to use Gemini to generate higher-quality AI images
Use Illuminate to create Audio discussions
Alibaba’s AI translation tool beats Google and ChatGPT❓

⚡️Productivity tips:

Ctrl + Shift + E: Track changes in Microsoft Word, enabling or disabling the Track Changes feature.

A spot of Humor

The Princess Bride is one of my favorite movies! In this video I extracted a piece to remind people how important it is to know different approaches…

How knowing your assetts changes the likelihood of success

What we utomated this week with AutoHotkey #61

This week’s video documenting what we automated with AutoHotkey can be seen here. While I showed 145 AHK files modified, part of that was due to me organizing our Radiologist clients together.

What we automated with AutoHotkey #61

⚕️If you’re a Radiologist (or any White-collar professional and new to AutoHotkey) you really should reach out to us as

AutoHotkey is times more powerful than you think!

BTW- Our the-Automator spy has been updated so the issues discovered in the vide are fixed!

Client’s say…

“I don’t know what I’d do without my AutoHotkey scripts! You guys have changed my life!” — Carol Amato

AHK Hero

Consider joining the AHK Hero club! Members receive 25% off courses, consultations, tutoring, done for you project work, etc. Currently we have over 330 hours of recordings teaching AutoHotkey that is exclusive to AHK Hero members❗

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

Help AHK Members with their code
Pre Hero call to show how to download and use “Computer use” from Anthropic
Branching in VS code with git
Using file compare in VS Code
Using “Hungarian Notation” on names of Variables, Arrays, Maps to indicate type
Quotation Marks for properties in Objects
How to properly include a DLL file on scripts you are compiling
GUI Edit control: How do you know when a person stopped typing❓
Opening Excel files (without having Excel installed)

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 calls are geared towards people new to AutoHotkey.)

️ Quotable quotes

If it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense — Grandma
S.Y.S.T.E.M. Save Your Self Time Energy & Money
Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend — Theophrastus
Time is linear; Success doesn’t have to be — Joe Glines

⏩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?

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The-Automator

Joe, Isaias, Irfan, Rizwan and staff

P.S. Growing up in California exposed me to quite a variety of people & cultures. I believe this is one of the reasons why I’m very good at “thinking outside the box”

I came to learn AutoHotkey from “the school of hard knocks”. There were no AHK courses out there and I didn’t know anyone that used it. I spent thousands of hours reading the forum and studying the documentation. All the while I was building up hundreds of friends & associates that are experts in AutoHotkey.

Our network AHK people & experiences are why we are the “go to” place for any AutoHotkey work. Give us a try ; I guarantee you’ll be impressed!

AutoHotkey News – I Almost Burned Down My House! Here’s How It Happened!

Howdy,

This weekend I worked on replacing a ceiling fan in the master bedroom.

My son asked if we should throw the circuit at the main breaker. I told him we turned the switch off on the wall and, as long as nobody messed with it, we’d be fine.

Boy was I wrong !

While taking down the old fan, “spark’s flew” ⚡ which (thankfully) through the circuit breaker.

I was shocked! (no not literally)

After further inspection I realized some one had left a bare “always hot” wire exposed in the box with nothing covering it. It’s a miracle we never had an issue before!

Thankfully the circuit breaker helped prevent anything catastrophic from happening.

This reminds me of how some people are “afraid” of AutoHotkey / Automation.

Many of my managers used to think I might “break something”.

They didn’t understand 99% of the time, AutoHotkey operates at the “surface level”.

And, while it can give the impression it is, it’s not “magical”

Most of the time AutoHotkey can only do what a human can do. Granted, it can do it much, much faster without errors but usually you’re not going to “break something.”

If you’re not understanding how AutoHotkey “works” or want to learn more about the 19 ways we use AutoHotkey to automate programs, Reply to this email and we can plan a call.

We’re the world’s best AutoHotkey shop and I guarantee we can save you time and

Now on with the show…

Major news: Claude announces Automating your Computer

I was amazed to hear that Claude just announced you can use their API to automate your PC.

While it is in beta, and relying on image search, it’s still a huge step forward. Apparently you send a screen-shot of your desktop and the API will return coordinates which you click. Not great, but I’ll take it! So far every example I’ve seen has been on a Mac however it will be easy to do this on a PC!

We haven’t created a video on it yet but Matt Wolfe documented using it on a Windows computer here.

How To Install and Use Claude’s New AI Agent

Fixing Badly Created Files

I used to download files from sources like LinkedIn, SurveyGizmo/Alchemer, Facebook etc. that would give me really “weird” issues with my data. The solution was technically simple however very complicated to explain. Basically some programs (like Excel, Word, etc.) look for the Byte Order Mark (BOM) and will not assign the correctly “guess” the encoding without it.

Our executable FileFixer adds the BOM to the file which then will correctly import by these tools. You can check out the issue in this video.

How to Remove those Weird characters in your file with File Fixer.exe

Standardizing File Paths across computers

When I worked in Corporate America I’d often have 2-3 work computers (and had 2-3 computers at home).

It was always annoying to have to account for various paths depending on what computer I was at so I found a robust way to create a “fake drive” in Windows.

This approach is especially helpful because it exists before windows finishes loading. So, if you’re calling programs to run at startup, this approach will not fail.

BTW- you might think you can just “map a drive” however, for reasons unknown to me, Microsoft’s tool only works on Network drives!

Now that we have a team of people working at the-Automator it is especially valuable to be able to copy a path to a file and share it with a colleague. You can check out the tool in this video.

It’s also super helpful for creating temporary drives for projects you’re working on. You can get the DriveMapper tool here.

Creating Fake Drives for easy access & Identical paths across computers

Easily revert to previous versions of your code in VS code

Ever try and add a new feature to your script only to get side-tracked and not be able to finish❓ Then you go to use your script and realize it’s no-longer working because you didn’t finish what you started?

Isaias walks us through how to avoid this exact situation using VS code & git integration in this video.

How to easily revert to earlier versions with VS Code and GIT

This is one of the reasons why we say you should switch to VS Code! It’s why we created an entire course walking you through how to get up and running in VS code.

Don’t forget, our courses come with a 30-day 200% money back guarantee!

Improving People’s Lives: Story #22

Michael, a Radiologist client, emailed me (somewhat panicked) saying that he changed his system and the script we wrote for him ~2 years ago had stopped working.

We squeezed in a call with him and not only fixed his tool but added some extra features so, if/when he upgrades his PC again, he can easily do the change himself❗