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.

TaskPaper is a GTD application similar to Things in terms of the way it manages things. When adding new tasks to your list you add them to the Inbox for sorting later into other projects. It even provides a quick entry keyboard shortcut that brings up a nice little interface for adding tasks on the go. It selects to add things to the Inbox by default but you can also add them to projects straight away and bypass the necessary organising later. TaskPaper, like things also supports tagging. Tags are added to tasks at the end with the @ prefix. You can add as many tags as you want and TaskPaper provides functionality for searching by tags, which shows all the tasks across all projects that share the tag your looking for. Once you have completed a task you mark it complete by adding the @done tag. You can move it to the Archive project yourself if you want or you can have TaskPaper do them all for you using the cmd + shift + D shortcut.

One of the main reasons I like TaskPaper is that your list is contained in a single plain-text file. The only thing that TaskPaper uses is the formatting with tab indentation and @ prefix for tags. What this means is that even if your not in front of your own computer you can sync it across numerous computers as a simple text file and still be able to understand it without the application. For example if I want to see what I had down in the web development project away from home I can look at the file over ssh and see what I want to see, without the need for any unnecessary software installs. What I guess I am trying to say is that TaskPaper excels in doing a great job while still keeping it simple.

If your looking for a simple, effective way to organise yourself on the Mac, I recommend you try it. You can download a free trial over at Hog Bay Software and if you like it enough, you can buy it for only $29.95, a good price for software this useful.

Enjoy

Patrick

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.

The Arduino also provides easy communication through its serial interface. Implementing serial communication between my MacBook and the board proved to be a very simple affair, instead of being the difficult task I expected it to be. Things such as receiving strings through the serial interface provide the programmer with nice little challenges which I found did a lot for bringing me back to thinking in C.

char string[16];
void setup(){
    Serial.begin(9600) // Start the serial port with a baud rate of 9600
}
void loop(){
    if (Serial.available() > 0){ // If there is a character to be read
        int i = 0; // Start a counter
        while (Serial.available() > 0){
            string[i] = Serial.read(); // Append the character to create a string
            i += 1; // Increment the counter
        }
    }
}

Serial communication on the MacBook end also proved to be easier than I first thought. Using the pySerial module for Python made serial communication with the board a breeze.

def read(self):
    import serial # Import the pySerial module
    s = serial.Serial("/dev/tty.usbserial-A9005fkd", 9600) # Start the serial interface with a baud rate of 9600
    message = s.readline() # Read a line from the serial interface
    return message # Return that line

I decided to use Python to write the “handler” that controlled the Arduino for many reasons. The handler application controlled all communication between components allowing for things such as the web interface (see below) to control the Arduino remotely. The main reason I chose Python is that it has ease of use in abundance. Python comes with native support for the SQLite database platform which I used to store information for a web interface in my project. Python also promotes good coding practices with things such as tab indentation (which every good programmer should use anyway) being required to nestle code under things such as if statements or while loops. This inherently breaks the code up into easily readable blocks making scripts a lot easier to read.

I decided that to keep things simple that I would write a web interface using Python as well for my project. There were many choices for web frameworks for Python but I eventually settled on the Django framework as it was the one recommended to me by friends. Django made developing the web interface quite easy with things such as limiting access to views to authenticated users becoming a one-line addition to the code. I found this a very pleasant change from using PHP and the CodeIgniter framework where such things would have to be written from scratch when starting a new project. It would make me seriously consider using Django for future development instead of PHP and CodeIgniter (although I do hear wonders about Ruby on Rails as well).

I hope to post more specifications on my project in the future but for reasons I can’t do it at the moment.

Enjoy,

Patrick

Enjoy,

Patrick

The site contains transcriptions of the music for the piano which are freely available and they also have recordings of the music on piano only, which is what I have linked to here (also due to copyright issues, I don’t break any rules by linking to a imitation performance). A quick search for ‘one final effort’ and you’ll easily find the original with orchestral backing. If you would like to download a pdf of the transcribed piece you can find it hereRegistration is required to download content from the site.

I hope you enjoy listening to it.