March 2015 – diary of an emacs tragic

March 29, 2015

Clock Part 3

large 7 segment display clock showing 9:53 time

I finally finished the outer case of my clock. Only 19 layers of 3mm acrylic stacked on top of each other.

Laser cutting the rear panel and finger slot

red perspex box with clock electronics showing, rear lid off — Rear panel with finger slot and barrel jack holder

rear panel of clock with wire going into the finger slot — Barrel Jack inside the finger slot

I built a finger slot into the back of the clock so it’s easier to carry, but also to house the barrel jack for mounting the clock flush to the wall, allowong me to hide the power cord in the wall (oneday)

pile of acrylic sheets neetly lined up — This is the pile of acrylic I had to cut out of the inside of the clock.

That pile on the left was cut out to make the cavity in the case.

March 25, 2015

Clock Part 2

Previously…

A bit more progress on my clock. I installed the dirty pink gel filter to increase the contrast ratio of the 7 segment displays, and started cutting the final case out of red 101 acrylic. Lots of laminations.

a digital clock showing the time of 11:22 — Clock

side of digital clock showing laminations of the case and the inner electronics and wires — Side of clock

March 5, 2015

Launch emacs from cygwin

cygwin and emacs logos with love heart in between

I have written about about using emacs in cygwin and how to launch emacs from cygwin, but I had some problems with the batch file approach in that emacs’ path differ from bash’s. Then ack fails to work from within emacs which makes me sad.

After googling around a bit, I saw a few suggestion that trie to fix the path in emacs, but I think a better approach is to launch emacs from within bash so it inherits the bash environment.

Here is my attempt using vbscript:

Dim WinScriptHost
Set WinScriptHost = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

strCmd = "C:\cygwin\bin\bash --login -c '/usr/local/bin/emacsclient -c -a /usr/local/bin/emacs.exe"

    If WScript.Arguments.Count = 1 Then
        'strCmd = strCmd &amp; " " &amp;"""" &amp; WScript.Arguments(0) &amp; """'" 
		wScript.Echo strCmd
	else
		strCmd = strCmd &amp; "'" 'close single quote
    End If

WinScriptHost.Run strCmd,0 
Set WinScriptHost = Nothing

Save that script somewhere and then make a Windows Shortcut to it but incle the wscript.exe in the target:

C:\Windows\System32\wscript.exe C:\Users\jason\launchemacs1.vbs

You can then launch it from the Start Menu in Windows 7.