September’s 2021 AutoHotkey Newsletters

Hi %Name%,

Things are coming along here now that I’m moved into my office we’re adding a carport. I actually helped dig the wholes the other day. It was tough work, but I’m looking forward to being able to park under it soon! Do you think my friend’s pickup is big enough??? 😲

Office hours tomorrow October 1^st

Tomorrow we’re planning office hours with Thom from TabNation at 11 EDT. If you have a question you’d like answered you can submit it here (or just go to my YouTube channel and ask it live). After this week I’m going to start alternating the guests. I plan to bring in people like: Jean Lalonde (Quick Access Popup) , Maestrith (AHK Studio), Tank (AutoHotkey forum), Hellbent (AHK GUI guru), etc. If there’s someone you’d like to have on, let me know!

FileExPro from SKAN 📢

I found this amazing function from SKAN give you access 1,317 file attributes! Granted, the actual number depends on the type of file you’re working with but it’s pretty amazing none-the-less. I worked through using it in this video.

Cleaning 📞 phone numbers with a RegEx

Regular Expressions are amazingly helpful! I have a good series on them here. In this video I walk through how to use one for cleaning up US Phone numbers.

How to record Audio 🎙️ using AutoHotkey and BASS.dll

In this tutorial I show how you can use the BASS.dll to record audio on your computer. I tested recording .mp3, .wav, .ogg, and .aiff file formats. I think there are native tools in windows to record audio, but this was pretty cool and allowed for flexibility of file formats.

The-Automators’ Podcast

#113: 7 reasons to talk to others about your programming
#112: The state of Automation & Future of Humanity
#111: Pros and Cons of Windows 365 / Windows in the “cloud”

AutoHotkey Webinar

Have you watched the last webinar on Objects? Jean Lalonde, author of Quick Access Popup, did a great job showing Simple and Associative Arrays. The next AutoHotkey webinar Jackie and I will be discussing functions. You can sign up here

What we’re reading

How to Clear Cookies and Site Data on Android
Android Now Lets You Control Your Phone With Your Face
How to Search Quickly on Windows 11

A spot of Humor

I don’t know if my wife has a pseudo-name, but she definitely could have drawn this!

Quotable quotes 🤔

My goal is no longer to get more done, but rather to have less to do. — Francine Jay
Build your own dreams or someone else will hire you to build theirs. — Farrah Gray
Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. — Albert Einstein

The-Automator

Joe and staff

P.S. Special thanks to the following for purchasing multiple AutoHotkey Udemy courses this month!

4 Richard C.
3 Jean Claude L..
3 Frank W.
3 Bettye C.
3 Angelo D.
2 Ulrich S.
2 Robert R.
2 Pang L.
2 Marcos T.
2 Lucas A.
2 Juan J.
2 Eugene V.
2 Cristi A.
2 Chachrist S.
2 Bartosz S.

AutoHotkey Newsletter 9/23/2021

Hi %Name%,

I hope you’re doing well! I’ve still been super busy around my house. Thankfully I’m (mostly) moved into my new office and are getting ready for the car port to be built. I was going to go across the entire driveway (fifty feet) but decided I enjoyed the morning sun hitting me while I’m at the computer. After spending ~20 years working in fortune 500 companies, I hated being in huge buildings w/o even being able see any sunlight. Now I can sit at my computer and get a tan! 🌞

This weekend was particularly hard work. I spent 20 hours running a chain saw and cutting the trees we fell in our pond so I could burn them. They were one of the big reasons why we didn’t have year-round water at the pond so I decided to cut them down. Hopefully, next week, the excavator will come in and dig the pond down more and expand it. Then I can begin to try and fill it! While I was watching the fire burn, I took a picture and happened to notice what looked like a sad-face in the fire. I circled it below but no other editing was done. Am I crazy???

Great call with Hellbent!

I had a great call with Hellbent yesterday! He’s working on additions to my screen clipping tool 😲 but mentioned he had a need class for making it easy to use GDIP to create layered windows. Here’s the video where he walks me through how to use it. You can get all resources mentioned in the video here.

BTW- Hellbent is hoping to join us this Friday during Office Hours. Will you be there %name%? If you can’t make it, but have a question, you can submit it here. If you’re not aware of Hellbent, he’s got a great YouTube channel that you can watch here.

Calculating distances between Latitude & Longitudes

A subscriber mentioned he was using Google maps for calculating the distances between two points. I realized I’d already solved this in AutoHotkey (with Maestrith’s help).
In this video, I walk through how to use the function.

Play / Pause a video in VLC- and get the time stamp

In this video I show how I automated starting/stopping VLC with AutoHotkey & the ACC library ⚡. More importantly my original script required the entire ACC library (and an #Include). I decided to “pull in” the functions I was relying on to have a self-contained script. Many users don’t understand how libraries work in AutoHotkey. Pulling in the functionality that you need reduces the issues you’ll have at a later date. Of course you also won’t have benefits if someone “improves” the ACC library, but I’d rather just trust what I have then hope new changes don’t mess-up my script!

📢 AutoHotkey Webinar on Objects

Jean Lalonde, author of Quick Access Popup, lead a great
webinar on Objects! As I mentioned in the webinar, I cover objects in the
Intermediate AutoHotkey course.
Below is the first hour of the webinar however the 2^nd hour was also really good! We talked more on objects, then Dimitri showed us how he recreated Notepad in V2 of AutoHotkey. We also did some Q&A with attendees.