 I'm Jamie Scott, CEO of JSA. This is webinar two in a five-part webinar series with our partners TruePath Technologies. Their web series is called Cool Tools, TruePath Cool Tools, and really they're awarding recognition to their top tools, their top software or shortcuts, clever platforms that they utilize every day to help make business smarter, faster, better for them. We are joined by the most amazing presenter here. I'm always in awe at how you do this, Douglas, where you're actually talking, demoing, answering questions. Mr wonderful, wonderful director, Douglas Morrow. Thank you very much. Of TruePath Technologies. Welcome, Douglas. Thank you. Great introduction. Thanks for having me. I love doing this. It's a lot of fun and we've gotten such great feedback and we're just excited to do these. They're a lot of fun to do and share this with everyone, so thank you. What is the theme of this TruePath Cool Tools webinar? It's to showcase the greatest tools that can help your business go faster. Today, Douglas will be walking us through his three top choices for December. And we've got Keyboard Pro, Dropbox, and Reg XR. So let's just go ahead and get right to it. And Douglas is the founder and senior engineer at TruePath Technologies, Inc. He's got 20 years expertise. We're talking enterprise data centers. He's also literally written the book, the O'Reilly edition, Essential SNP. It's the number one right now on Amazon for selling network management books. So, great resource out there. Now in its second edition, go ahead and check it out. And it talks to Douglas's expertise, particularly in software publishing. And one last note, check out TruePath's Telco web portal, LMS. And that is, again, another good showcase there for how great Douglas is with all the software management. So let's go ahead and get right to Douglas on the Hot Keyboard Pro. So again, Jamie and everybody online, thanks very much for having us again and allowing us to showcase really the tools that we use day in and day out. Now, we're not taking any money or anything like that for these kinds of reviews. These were something that Jamie and I put together because quite frankly, during conversations, we end up talking with people every day to say, oh, what is that that you're using? Or how do you do this? And so this is our second one. The first one we did, Jing. We did the schedule me and we did join me. And today we're going to talk about three other tools that, again, I use them daily. And the first one that we're going to talk about is the Hot Keyboard Pro. So very high level Hot Keyboard Pro is basically just a keyboard macro. And that really, really sounds boring. And that doesn't show a lot of fun there. But where it stands apart is the fact that its interface, its ease of use, and its things it can do above and beyond just regular pasting text and things like that. So the best way to showcase this tool is to actually show you a demo of it. So again, hot-keyboard.com, you go in here, you can take a look at it. You can download it, purchase it. We'll get into that. It's the price is pretty cheap. So don't shy away from that. But let's get in and let's just create a new macro. So what we're going to do is I'm going to click on new macro down here. And it presents me with a whole bunch of different things I can do. I can open a file, I can capture the screen, I can do search and replace. And with this, I'm just going to paste text. And so what I'm going to do is, you know, in the example, I end up having to type our support email, Troopattechnologies.com. And let me tell you, look, even that, as many times I typed it, I will, technologies. Dude, I have to like clap it out. So, you know, right there, tickets at Troopattechnologies.com, I want to go ahead and paste this. And throughout the day, I end up pasting or typing that in a thousand times. And about 98% of the time, I end up typing it wrong. So I'm going to go back. Worst case is to think about from a sales perspective, I say, hey, send an email over to our salesperson, Alan or whatnot. And I type a email wrong. So what we can do here is I'm going to say, instead of rich text, I'm just going to say plain text. And now I have the option to say, well, how do I want to run this little macro? How do I want to put this email address in here? And mind you, this could be anything. This could be a sales thing that says, thanks again for, you know, reaching out. Please contact us at 555-1212, you know, in this kind of thing, you put my signature in and all that good stuff. But in this case, we're just going to do an email. So here's where it becomes very easy. I'm going to do a, in order to initiate this, I'm going to use a hot key. So you can't see me typing on there on my keyboard, but I'm going to do a control, a shift to watch this happen right here. Control shift, I'm going to call it L. I don't know. You can, I can show you how to remember that later too, which is pretty interesting. So I'm going to do a control shift L. And I'm going to click, yeah. Are you just assigning any letter and format? Does it have to be like three keys that you're holding down simultaneously or? That's a great question. So Windows as a whole already has a lot of shortcuts like control C for copy, control B for paste. You probably don't want to reassign those. So sort of my rule of thumb is use, use three. And so when you do a control shift, that, that gets away from almost all other type of predefined macros. The other thing you can do is, you can do four. So I could do control, shift, alt, alt if you wanted to. But that, you know, that seems to be a little, a little crazy. I can show you as in a little bit how we're going to bring up a little cheat sheet and how to bring up a little menu so that you can just say, hey, show me the menu of my macros because I forget them all. And then you can jump right to it. So great question. I try to stick with at least three. So I did a control shift L. It's going to paste this in here. I'm going to click OK. I'm going to bring up a notepad. That is it right there. So you can see I'm basically just doing, you know, control shift L over and over again. Again, that doesn't seem very powerful. But what we can do is we can make it even easier. And what I'm going to do now is I'm going to bring back up the hot keyboard pro. And I'm going to edit that macro. And instead of a, or in addition to a hot key, so you can keep a control shift L. I could call it, let's call it TTT for like, you know, something to do with tickets. So I'm going to do that. And then every time I type TTT and it automatically sends that in there. So that could be another macro is we call ours Troopette Technologies. We do TPT a lot short. And that could be something that could very easily set that macro. And then I would never have to type that again. And you know, we got a great question actually from Steven Moser, one of our viewers here. He's asking, we'll tell you if you're overwriting a preexisting hot key, will it warn you? That is a great question. And I don't know the answer to that. But why don't we go ahead and try to do that. So we did control shift L. I'm just going to create another one real quick. And I'm going to call it testing 123. I'm going to do a hot key. And I'm going to do control shift L. I'm going to do okay. And there you go. Perfect. That is a great question. It goes ahead and warns you. So that's pretty cool. So one thing that great, great question, by the way, thanks for asking that. So this is just our little demo machine. One of the other things that I have on my desktop again, because this is a tool that I and the other engineers use all the time. My memory is shot. I have no idea what macro or, you know, I need to have something remind me of it. So we can do two things. One is, we can create a little cheat sheet on here that will allow us to print this out. And right here, here's your little cheat sheet card that you can very easily print. And now I have that up on my screen right now. And so when we take a look at that, you can actually see that we have, you can have it by menu, you can have it by view, and that allows you to do that so that you can see it, use it, and be reminded of it. The other thing we can do is we can pop a little menu up. So I have this little menu here called control shift Q. So when I do control shift Q, it's going to bring a menu up. So I'm going to do this, and it's going to bring a menu up. And now take a look. Now I can very easily jump to my little macros. Now we've talked about text, but guess what? You can do some other things. You can open a folder. I don't know about you, but every time I'm going, somebody steps in, I need to mute my music. Somebody comes in, they're talking, the phone rings, right? What do I have to do? I have to go down here. I have to find the little thing that says volume, and I got to click on mute, do that. Well this, guess what? You can set a macro up for it. You can do control alt space, and it'll automatically mute. You could bring a control panel. You could bring up, you could shut down windows. So, you know, as I leave, I could go ahead and just, you know, execute control alt F12, immediately shut it down. So, great tool. Absolutely love it. Use it every day. This tool, without a doubt, receives 2016 Cool Tools Award. I just, so why we love the Hot Keyboard Pro. It's one of the greatest macro tools out there. Really does speed up your life, creates different macros. You don't have to worry about those for get repetitive tasks, like inserting the text that you write all the time. Again, great sales tool for sure, and coding tool. And it opens web links much more. Check out www.hot-keyboard.com some more. Oh, and is there a pricing there? Yes, there is. Thank you for asking. Let me just bring it up. It's actually, it's 30 bucks for private and 54 business license. So, pretty inexpensive. I tell you, after you do, you know, after you do a couple shortcuts and you figure out, one of the things that we talked about last episode was the schedule utility. And that's something that I used to have to go and find, copy it, paste it, and then put some pretense around it. Hey, take a look at my calendar link, pick a few times at work for you, and I'll send you calendar invite. Well, guess what? That is a control shift P on my keyboard. And I type that and paste that in every day. So, you do that a few times, you get some new prospects, you prohibit yourself from mistyping things. 50 bucks is the easiest money you ever spent. And one other question from our audience here, does it work with Mac too? I think so, right? Yeah, let me look because I'm almost positive that this was a downer. Yeah. Okay, here's the, here's the big no-no. It only works with windows, dunk, dunk. But I think, oh, it's an addictive tool for those of us who use it. So, hopefully they'll come up with a Mac version soon. Maybe this will be a little pressure note for them to or switch over to windows or buddy at Linux. And, you know, some people would say Mac is Linux, but we'll save that for another episode. That would be webinar 3, 4 bucks. Yeah, exactly. So, I know you want to get us over to your Dropbox demo. Okay. So, we're going to talk about a awesome utility. Been around for a while. It's called Dropbox. And at a very high level, Dropbox is a cloud storage service software. It can work on your phone, work on your computer. And the short short of it is that I have a file that's sitting in my, on my computer. And it is now in my Dropbox folder. And while it is physically on my computer, it is also up into the Dropbox cloud. Now, it automatically synchronizes, which is great. And the other thing is that I can get it onto my phone as well. There is a fingerprint password on there. So, it's nice with the security. But the big thing about Dropbox is the second real big feature here is that once it's out into the cloud, once you can do things like that, like synchronize across all of your different devices, you can turn on sharing. And we talked a little bit about last Cool Tools webinar was Jing, being able to do screenshots. And then being able to share that very easily because it automatically put things into your, into your clipboard. So, this one makes it just as easy. So, if I go into my Dropbox folder, I've got a document here, I can right click it and say copy Dropbox link. And if I do that, it's going to put a publicly accessible Dropbox link that I can share with friends, family, and colleagues. So, when I go to that, this is what it would look like. And then they could download it. They could save it to their own Dropbox. So, if it was a very large file, they wouldn't have to bring it down to their computer. They could put it to their Dropbox, then it would synchronize across all the things, all the different devices. You can write comments in here. So, there's a way to actually collaborate. Jamie, did you have a question? Well, yeah, you know, Douglas, I was so excited when you said you were going to demo Dropbox because I feel like it's one of those tools that we're all using, but all still sort of figuring out the tricks here. Because for me, you know, folks will share their marketing files with our team and we're all, it's just, is there a way where it's not so heavy on our desktops? I feel like I allow something to be added into my Dropbox, and all of a sudden, my laptop just gets so much slower because I ran out of room. How does that work? Is there a shortcut there? There is. So, Dropbox has the ability to, which is a good thing, be able to share files and actually synchronize files. So, as an example, you and I have this marketing folder shared. And in here, we've got a couple of PDFs you and I are actually working on. Now, in your Dropbox, this is going to count against your space. In my Dropbox, this counts against my space. And everybody gets, I think now it's two gigs. There's a couple of ways you can get some additional free space, you know, sharing and getting other people to sign up. But if I were to dump 40 gigs into the marketing folder, that would hit your spot. Well, one thing you can do is you can go into the folder. So, as I see marketing goods here, I could get a public link right here. So, I could say, you know what, anybody with this link could now view this folder. And I could set different link things to say, I don't want people to be able to get to it only with a password. And I want to expire the link. So, this might be great for a client of yours to say, hey, you know what, we're going to do this project. It's going to be two months. I'll put it six months out there. And I'll still put a password out there so that, even though, as you can tell with the incognito, and I'm thinking this is still going to be in my pay spin, you can see up here that it is a, I don't want to say encrypted, but cryptic, you know, URL. Could somebody find that? Yeah, somebody could find that. You know, somebody could actually type that in. There's nothing preventing them from stopping that in. So, the same thing with the links here, even though I'm going to share it out, I still may want to do that. The other thing I could do is I could just share it. Once I copy that link, I'm now going to go and copy that entire folder. So, now when I go into this, I've now shared with, let's say you, Jamie, this entire folder, none of this counts against you. But the downside is, is you really can't collaborate with that. You and I have sort of, you know, I have shared my folders. So, it's the difference between just viewing it versus being able to edit it. So, viewing it, it can stay on the cloud, edit it, it's down on your desktop. Yes, yes. Now, the other piece, too, is that because you may have a server that has your Dropbox, which has a terabyte worth of space, your laptop might not, or you might have the same account, but you don't want to synchronize everything. Dropbox gives you that ability by going in, and if I go into here and say preferences, I have now the ability to do, in my account, I can say selective sync. And I could say, you know what? Marketing goods on my laptop is three terabytes. You know, I don't want that to happen. So, I'm going to uncheck that. Now, it's still going to be in the Dropbox cloud. It's very important. It doesn't mean that it gets removed or anything. It's just not going to get synchronized locally on this particular machine. So, that's another trick you can do. The other piece is called file requests. So, I, you may have clients out there that have to sort of dump a very large files your way, and what you can do is you can create a file request to say, you know what? I'm going to, and you see we already, you know, created one, but I'll go through the whole thing. I'm going to create some new marketing files, and there is a new directory that gets created. And now what happens is that I have this special link, and when I send that link to my clients, they can now upload files to it without being a Dropbox user, without affecting their Dropbox, because they wouldn't have to sync it there and then say file share. It's a way to do sort of one way requests for files, and it is very useful. We use that for customers that have to upload core files, dump files, things like that that are very big. It now gets pushed up in here, and then it gets synchronized between the engineering computing team. So, now they can all get access to it. So, very good way to do that. One other huge feature for us that we use is version control. So, when you look at this, what you have to be worried about is rolling corruptions. It's great that I have a copy on the cloud. It's great that I have a copy on my laptop and on my phone, but if I mess this file up, it's going to be copied. It's going to roll that corruption all the way through. So, if I go into this file, anybody remember the, there we go, there we go. Start typing it, right? I'm going to save this thing, go back, and you'll see very quickly that this little green check mark means that the synchronization is complete. So, if I right click it, I have a couple of other context menus. I could share, copy, dropbox, link, view on dropbox, and version history. This is the power. I absolutely love this. So, I'm going to right click, save version history. Now, I'm already logged in. That's why we're able to jump right to it. And now you can see, look at this today, December 14th. You can see when we have some of these changes. And if I click on this dock, I can take a look at it, and guess what? I can immediately restore it back. That's great. When you're working and collaborating with people, look, accidents happen. There's a way for you to go back and restore these things very quickly and easily. Have some accountability with those files. The pricing for this, when you go into the upgrade account, you can see that the pro is one terabyte. Business is 1250 a month. Here are all the different features and functionalities that you get. We find that the pro for us works perfectly. You can have up to 30 days of version history. And for us, that's enough. Because after a couple of weeks, if you haven't noticed your files aren't off, then you might have to get up into the business and enterprise level. But we do the pro. We use a lot of these features and functionalities. And if you go up to the business, it's even better. Without a doubt, I use this daily backups, recovery, sharing, huge benefit to our business. Definitely 2016 Cool Tools Award. Boom. There it is. Absolutely. But Dropbox, why we love it. Obviously, you can sleep soundly at night knowing that your photos, your docs, your videos, your files, safety secured, again, up in that cloud, ability to go ahead and check different files, different levels of the files, return back to the old one that you might have liked better. You can access anything on all your devices. And it's easy to share with others. Oh, I got Michael Gwertzman. From the mobile app. Can they be hosted? Or is that just for accessing? Oh, that's a good question. Well, I think that when we talk about hosting, we need to think that really it's being hosted on the Dropbox cloud. The computer itself is, it's not really being used as hosting just as much as the phone. And with that said, you can do when or land sinking. So as I drop a 50 gig file onto my computer, it has to go up to Dropbox cloud. But I have another engineering computer next to me, and we're on a gig network. It's smart enough if you turn that feature on to synchronize across the local area network. So both of them don't have to go up to the cloud and then come back down to the cloud. So it saves some of the bandwidth. So there are ways to actually host webpages. There are tons of tricks and tips and ways to use Dropbox that you've never even thought of. And of course, like anything on the internet, people are doing it and setting it up. So when you talk about hosting, in the end, it really ends up living and being hosted from the cloud itself. You do bring up a good thing about photos. Dropbox has some automatic upload features on the phones these days that automatically go up to the photos directory. They have a nice way of displaying photos on Dropbox, along with a utility on the desktop that when you do a screenshot, sort of like Jing, it will automatically upload to the photos directory and you have to go in and get the link for that. So hopefully that answered your question. It doesn't really get hosted from your phone or from the computer, more from the cloud. So our next tool to demo us through here, our last one of the day, Reg Exer. Can you walk us through that, my friend Douglas? Let's start with what is Reg Ex? So Reg Ex is a sort of a scripting language to be able to pull information out of a data source. So with this, you'll see that there's an expression up here where we say, I want anything from A to Z that is a word that has one or more characters match it. That sounds pretty boring. Technical people, coders, web programmers, data crunchers, we use Reg Ex all the time. And what happens is that there's a little bit of hit and miss kind of programming going on to where we say, okay, well, I think it's this, but is it really? Should we start with word? Should we start with this? I want to be able to match this and I really don't know if that's going to hit or not. As you can see here that I want to actually match media temple, not just this one word media and then another word temple. So we may have to add in things like spaces, we may have to add other things in there. And so as I explore the expression, that's probably the best way. Hit or miss. That doesn't seem fair, but that really is what it is. But as we go through expressions, we have the ability to actually test it. And you can paste things in here. So usually what we'll do is we'll take a little bit of the data source and we'll paste it in here. And then we'll start exploring the expressions up here. So testing some of my skills. If we wanted to match this particular piece here, which is food.co.uk, what does that mean? Well, if I just type in the word foo here, is that going to give me everything? Well, you see, look, I matched foo at demo.net. I don't want that. I want to do foo and I want it to be period. Well, in reg x, period means any character. So I have to escape it. Then I want to do a co. Then I want to escape that again. And then I want to say UK. And you'll see here that there's an extra slash. So I may have to put that in there. We could even do something like this to be able to grab that entire link. So that's a way to do the expression. What I like about reg x, as you can see, it's live. It's free. It's easy to use. You can quickly paste things in there. There's a nice little reference card to be able to look at what things mean because we always forget being able to anchor word boundaries. Something that happens at the beginning of the line. So this would mean I want to do that same link. So if I copy this link, watch this example, if I copy this link and I put it in other places, it still matches. But I only want this first one. Well, what I can do is I can match it to the beginning of the line up here. So we have the match at the beginning, which would typically do that there. And so we're going to be able to match that. I don't know why that isn't matching at the beginning. But anyway, so then you have all of your anchors. The other nice thing about reg xr is that it has a community so that you can look at different examples. So as we go through here, like IP address, you would have never thought that this would have been a match. But take a look. So now we can match IP addresses and look at that huge regex. Now that is actually going to match valid IP addresses. And we've matched it. But guess what? If I put one, three, this, this, this, if I do 670, that's not a valid IP address. That's not going to match. This is something that's very useful. And again, with the community, I don't have to worry about this coming up with this expression on my own. It's into the community. You're able to go in there and see some other items out there. And the big thing too is you can put your data in there, play around the expression, look what works for you, and then bring it back to your coding and rest assured that it's actually going to work for you. There's other little pieces down at the bottom to where you can go in and take a look at the... This is a nice feature here is where it actually explains this. So you know what does this mean here? So B means it's a word boundary. Down here, character, we're going to match two characters. Down here, we're going to match a particular character set, 0 through 9. It gets complicated. But I tell you what, beautiful way to play around with the expressions. See that it matches. Again, tool we use all the time. Engineering uses it all the time. When we're getting into things, where we're trying to start getting into complicated expressions, we bring up Rejector. We use it. 2016, Definite Cool Tool Award. Dan, love it. So Rejector, why we love it. It helps Linux and other regular expressions and tax programmers basically help them create their shortcuts. Streamline their trivial testing, their copying, their pasting, matching, highlighting, all that stuff, free and online community driven. So we love that. Regexor.com is where to find out more. Mm-hmm. So with that, that concludes our little demo today. Coming up on February 17th at 11am east coast. We're going to preview what's next, Douglas? We are going to preview some cool products from HW Group. They are environmental, door contacts, humidity, amperage, light, wind. They do some really cool things. They've come out with some new units. They're just a lot of fun. And if you're techie and if you need to monitor those kinds of things, those kinds of environmental, those kinds of facilities, dry contacts, check it out. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're actually going to have the units in-house here. We're going to change the screens around so you're not looking at me but looking at this as we sort of do some fun techie unboxing. Check it out. Should be good. And we always love unboxing. All right. So in case you are not sure, TruthPath technologies, well if you haven't heard, they are US-based leading edge IT software and services company specializing in in-house services for new or existing IT monitoring software. You can see all these great logos here, including some of our friends in the telecom and tech industries that are utilizing TruthPath. And so thank you, Douglas, for all that you and your team do in terms of bandwidth and line quality monitoring and reporting. Thank you, viewers, for tuning in. And even after this, if you're watching it on demand, you have some questions or you have a cool tool that you want us to feature next time, go ahead and tweet at us and or use the hashtag the path to cool tools. Just a hand email jsa underscore TruthPath at jamesfatter.com. Thank you, Douglas, for your time and insight. You're welcome. Blown away by how agile and flexible you are. This is always fun. I love doing this. And thanks to everybody joining. We got our biggest crowd so far. Do we have any other questions or I don't know? Let's just check the question boards. Boards figured out now. Thank you, Jamie and Douglas. Thank you. We appreciate that. Thanks for joining. Have a wonderful, wonderful day, guys. Happy holidays and see you February for the next version of the next installation, if you will, of TruthPath cool tools webinar series. Thank you. All right. Bye, everyone.