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…
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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 1st) 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
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Joe, Isaias, Irfan, Rizwan and staff
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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!
