<p>Looks like the Windows build of Emacs 24.4 has been released to <a href="http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/">http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/</a> on November 15th. As usual, I appear to be a few days behind the times.</p>

<p>I’ve been using the official GNU distribution of <a href="http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/">Emacs for Windows</a> for the last few years and am very happy with it. Well, <em>usually</em> I am very happy with it until someone sends me a 25GB log file I need to analyse and the 32 bit Emacs refuses to play when faced with the enormity of the file in question.</p>

<p><a href="http://melpa.org/">MELPA</a> has recently got its own domain (<a href="http://melpa.org/">melpa.org</a>) so it’s time to update your list of package repositories with the new URL.</p>

<p>For those who aren’t aware of this yet, there is an <a href="http://emacs.stackexchange.com/">Emacs Stackexchange</a> site that’s currently in beta. I’d like to encourage everybody to take part in it so it can become a viable site on the Stack Exchange network.</p>

<p>Announcement on the <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-10/msg00626.html">emacs-devel</a> list. Fingers crossed that 24.4. will be out in a few days as mentioned.</p>

<p>If you, like me tend to carry around or “cloud around” a single .emacs file so you end up with similar environments wherever you have an Emacs install, you know it’s a little painful to ensure that you have the same set of basic packages installed on each one of your Emacs installations. As I had mentioned before I don’t use that many third party packages so my Emacs configurations aren’t that complicated, but I always prefer to have the computer remember things…

<p>A common annoyance with Emacs when working on a code base that has duplicate file names is that the mode line tends to display the buffer names as “one.py:<1>”, “one.py:<2>” etc etc. That doesn’t help much with telling them apart and I find it confusing.</p>

<p>Putting the OpenSprinkler and Raspberry Pi together was easy, getting them to run showed my inexperience when it comes to playing with hardware. The overall install went pretty smoothly and the <a href="http://rayshobby.net/docs/ospi14_manual.pdf">documentation</a> is good and easy to follow so I’m not going to ramble on about it for very long, but just throw up some notes.</p>

<p>When it comes to Emacs, I <em>am</em> an amateur at best, but part of the fun is that I keep discovering new useful functionality.</p>

<p>It’s one of those days, thanks to a hard disk going south I ended up having to rebuild the system drive on one of my machines. After putting the important software back on there - “Outlook and Emacs”, as one of my colleagues calls it - I had to reapply some of the usual tweaks that make a generic developer workstation <em>my</em> developer workstation.</p>