Howdy,
I was chatting with my good friend Ryan Wells about how people have difficulty seeing the repetitiveness in what they do as mentioned in last week’s newsletter intro. He proposed the idea of how a custom baker makes personalized cakes.
Because the baker has his client in mind, and is changing the frosting and design on top, they view every cake as “% unique”.
Yet 99% of the ingredients and work that goes into the cake are IDENTICAL to the last one they made!
They also use the same oven, cook it for nearly the same amount of time, and use the same pans, hot-pads, delivery boxes etc.
So probably over 99% of the effort that goes into making the cake is identical to other cakes.
The differences, while they seem large to the human eye, are very small from the perspective of a task and training someone (or something) to re-create it.
My question to you is:
What are your “custom cakes“❓
What work do you do repeatedly that you think is vastly different however, in reality, is 99% the same.
What “looks different” but, in reality, is the same thing with a different colored frosting?
Whatever that thing is: you should be able to automate a lot of it!
If you’d like some help identifying the repeatable things, look at my calendar and pick a time to review❗
Now on with the show…
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Binding Parameters to a Function
During the AHK hero calls we’ve been teaching people the many benefits of using Functions. It reminded me of this video where Isaias discusses how and why to Bind Parameters to a Function.
You Won’t Believe How Easy It Is to Bind Parameters to a Function in AutoHotkey
Compiling AutoHotkey v2 Scripts
A YouTube subscriber watched a video we put together several years ago about compiling AutoHotkey v1 scripts but asked about V2. While there isn’t a big difference, we realized there are some other things we could cover so we created this video showing many of the options available to you when you compile in v2.
How to Compile AutoHotkey v2 Scripts
Advanced lesson on monitoring Protocols and analyzing your Network Traffic
Wireshark is a crazy powerful, free, network protocol analyzer that captures and inspects data packets traveling through a computer network in real time. It’s an essential tool for network troubleshooting, security analysis, and understanding how applications and protocols actually communicate on networks.
Unfortunately, because it is so powerful, it is tough to learn.
I watched this video and was able to get a decent grasp of how to use it.
Wireshark Tutorial for Beginners | Network Scanning Made Easy
Check out this new Clipboard Editor
Don’t forget to check out Jean Lalonde’s new Quick Clipboard Editor. It’s a great tool that you didn’t realize you need! You can get an idea of hit’s capabilities in this video.
What’s a Clipboard Editor—and Why Is Everyone Talking About It?
What we’re reading
- Don’t ignore the Power of F4 in Microsoft Excel
- How to stop Windows 11 from Auto-Installing Device Drivers
- 5 places Incognito Mode Is Useful (and 3 where it isn’t)
AI / Chat GPT-3 News / Usage
- Microsoft launched powerful AI ‘agents’ that could completely transform your workday
- SWiRL: The business case for AI that thinks like your best problem-solvers
- Vibecode your video: Descript’s new AI co-editor
⚡️Productivity tips: Easy Macro Access in Office
Alt + F8: Open the “Macro” dialog box in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, allowing you to run or create macros.
A spot of Humor:
Harrison Ford Tells The GREATEST Joke of All Time! BROCCOLI?
Client’s say…
“There’s no way I could have accomplished what we’ve done without your support!” — Stephanie Holland
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 402 hours of recordings teaching AutoHotkey that is exclusive to AHK Hero members❗
You can watch 1 hour a day for a year and not repeat content! That’s a lot of AHK Learning!
During this Friday’s call we’re planning to discuss:
- Help AHK Hero Members with their Questions & Code
- Using a SetTimer verse a Loop for a Tooltip
- Checking to see if the computer is “online“
- Functions: Using Lambdas (Anonymous Functions) / FatArrows in v2
- When the Order of #Includes Matter
- Work through Merge Similar Files
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
- Decisions without actions are worthless — Dan Kennedy
- Success comes from failure. Not from memorizing the right answers. — Donald Trump
- Fire fast; Hire slow — Dan Kennedy
- Give me 6 hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first 4 sharpening the axe — Abraham Lincoln
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Joe, Isaias, Irfan, Rizwan and staff
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P.S. It’s super-easy to not realize much of what we do is repetitive. I think humans are hard-wired to think that what we do is “unique” (which helps our self-esteem) however the vast majority of what we do is repeatable (or everything would cost a zillion dollars).
The sooner you can realize that, the sooner you’ll be spotting what you can, and should, automate!
