I've long wanted to be able to right-click any file in Windows and have “Edit with Emacs” among the options there. Upgrading my desktop computer after many years gave me the right motivation to finally implement little productivity improvements like this one. The following is a registry file that I've tested on Windows 7 and 10. It is hardly original—many others have posted similar things on Stack Exchange and elsewhere—but I'm documenting this version of it here really so I don't forget it myself.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT*\shell]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT*\shell\openwemacs]
@="&Edit with Emacs" 
"icon"="C:\\emacs-26.1\\bin\\emacsclientw.exe"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT*\shell\openwemacs\command]
@="C:\\emacs-26.1\\bin\\emacsclientw.exe --alternate-editor=\"C:\\emacs-26.1\\bin\\runemacs.exe\" -n \"%L\""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\openwemacs]
@="Edit &with Emacs"
"icon"="C:\\emacs-26.1\\bin\\emacsclientw.exe"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\openwemacs\command]
@="C:\\emacs-26.1\\bin\\emacsclientw.exe --alternate-editor=\"C:\\emacs-26.1\\bin\\runemacs.exe\" -n \"%L\""

At some point since my original post in February an update to Chrome broke the layout of the EV100 logo overlay you (should!) see on the upper-left corner of this page. Before fixing it I noticed that nothing was visible there except on the contact page, and that was because that page is short enough to not require scrolling on my display. The bug wasn't present on firefox, IE, or mobile Chrome on my Android.

A little investigation revealed that the element itself was correctly positioned but that the background image wasn't visible. Removing the fixed positioning of the background (but not the element) proved to be the solution. I replaced this:

background: url(/images/ev100logobanner.png) no-repeat fixed top right;

With this:

background: url(/images/ev100logobanner.png) no-repeat;

I don't exactly understand what changed in Chrome and why this fixed it, or indeed, why I had it that way in the first place. Any explanations are welcome!

Although I'm not very active on either platform, I have accounts on both Github, for some of my more public software efforts (mostly web development experiments), and on Grabcad, for some parts I've modeled in CAD that are both non-proprietary and potentially useful to other engineers. These models are mostly commercially available products that I have to work with or design something around, and Grabcad has a more appropriate audience for that than, say, Thingiverse. Naturally Grabcad also gets bonus points for having been an Estonian startup!

So if you'd like to be fully aware of my activities on the Internet, now split over at least ten platforms including this blog, visit both sites and follow me there too. Thanks!

I recently built a small app that calculates a resistor's value based on color coding. This was an educational exercise in plain-vanilla javascript and old-fashioned html+css, although using jQuery would have saved me a lot of typing if nothing else. I tried to keep the color definitions and so forth as D.R.Y. as possible, going so far as to populate the select boxes from javascript using tedious DOM hacking. I'm sure many possible improvements will be immediately obvious to the attentive reader.

I'm starting another AVR project using my by-now-venerable STK500 and the latest 6.1 version of Atmel's Studio software. Although I'm sure Atmel would like all developers everywhere to buy STK600s, it's perfectly possible to use the older development kit with the newest software, although this combination is not as well documented as I'd like; hence I'm using this post to collect a few tips distilled from recent experience.