A while back during MacHeist 2 last year I acquired a copy of the GTD application for OS X called TaskPaper. At the time I didn’t think much of it, I saw it as a simple app for making to-do lists rather than anything else and I didn’t really have a need for it. It has been sitting in my Applications folder almost completely unused for almost a year now until I started looking into GTD methods to get some hint of organisation around all the stuff I’m doing.

I played around with the Things demo for a while and I have to say I was quite impressed with it. Things provides a really nice interface which made it easy to use, which was a big plus. Things also sports an iPhone app which synced perfectly with the Desktop version. The one thing (no pun intended) that put me off was the price. Buying the pair of applications for both the phone and the desktop would cost just over €50 which is quite a bit, considering the times we’re in. I also found that while Things sported a lot of nice features, that I wouldn’t necessarily use all of them, so it wasn’t really worth it.

Then I re-discovered TaskPaper sitting in my Applications folder. After firing it up and looking at it properly for the first time I realised it was much much more than a simple application for making to-do lists.

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After my experience in last years Young Scientist Exhibition I decided that I would definitely try and enter again this year. After a lot of thought I decided upon my project entitled ‘Energy Saving through Automation’. In a nutshell I created an automation system for controlling household appliances and domestic lighting to combat standby power wasting.

Fortunately my project won two prizes, being 1st in Intermediate Technology Individual and the Science Foundation of Ireland special award which is given for research/engineering in the field of energy conservation technology.

The electronics part of the project was created using the Arduino micro-controller platform. For those that don’t know what the Arduino is, its a prototyping electronics platform created for hobbyists, by hobbyists. The Arduino provided the perfect platform on which to start working with electronics. The board itself runs its own variant of C/C++ and the support forums and language reference are to say the least, second to none.

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To say the least, life has been catching up on me lately leaving me with little time to dedicate to blog posts but things are beginning to clear up and I hope to be posting more often from now on, starting with the new design. For a long time now I havn’t had the design skills or the necessary time to roll my own theme and have been using the ones generously released to the public by their makers. From now on if I do a site redesign, it’ll be my own work and creativity and not others. I don’t know how often that’ll be but practice makes perfect.

Enjoy,

Patrick