Rhasspy as service with Debian installation

This post is a placeholder description for how to setup the standalone Rhasspy voice-assistant as a service on Debian/Ubuntu until the official docs are updated. This was gleaned from various posts on the Rhasspy forums and the OLD Rhasspy github, and then refined via trial and error.

Steps:

  1. Create a service account to run the Rhasspy daemon as a service. Instructions are here.
  2. Switch to the Rhasspy service account
$ sudo su rhasspy
$ cd ~
  1. Install the Rhasspy based on your use case. For me, this was for running Rhasspy as a satellite on various Raspberry Pi 4s around the house, that use a central Rhasspy instance running as a server interconnected with Home Assistant.

  2. Make sure that Rhasspy runs

$ rhasspy --profile en 2>&1 | cat

In a browser, navigate to http://:12101

You should see the following:

If you are good, then stop Rhasspy by using the keystrokes [CNTL]+C

  1. Switch back to your privileged account
$ exit
  1. Setup up the service account config directory
$ sudo mkdir /opt/rhasspy
  1. Create the service definition file
$ sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/rhasspy.service

then

[Unit]
Description=Rhasspy Service
After=syslog.target network.target mosquitto.service

[Service]
Type=simple
# for command, see https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy/issues/42#issuecomment-711472505
ExecStart=/bin/bash -c 'rhasspy -p en --user-profiles /home/rhasspy/.profiles/rhasspy 2>&1 | cat'
WorkingDirectory=/opt/rhasspy
User=rhasspy
Group=audio
RestartSec=10
Restart=on-failure
StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
SyslogIdentifier=rhasspy

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Save the file using [CNTL]+o, and [CNTL]+z

  1. Enable the service
$ sudo systemctl enable rhasspy
  1. Now start the service
$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl start rhasspy
  1. Test that Rhasspy works by navigating to the Rhasspy Admin website on the device

In a browser, navigate to http://:12101

You should see the following:

If you are good, you should be able to start configuring the device as a satellite by following the instructions on the Rhasspy documentation site.

As is the case with all techno-things this approach will become outdated over time, so check the commands against the current version of Debian or Ubuntu. Drop me a line on Twitter if you find this useful or if needs updating.

Creating a Linux user who cannot get an interactive shell on Debian or Ubuntu

Every now and then you find yourself repeating the same Linux admin tasks, querying the community and having to piecemeal together an answer. This is the case with creating a “service account” to run satellite instances of Rhasspy on a bunch of Debian-based IoT devices scattered around my house. The purpose is so that you aren’t running a service (daemon) as yourself or as root. This creates a situation where if someone where to use the webpage to somehow hack into the computer, they would be limited in what they can do because they won’t have access immediately to a Linux shell.

3D Printed Rhasspy running on Raspberry Pi4 courtesy @tobetobe

The commands below will create a user named ‘rhasspy’ with its own $HOME directory for placing the settings in the “.profile/rhasspy” and for installing the service account’s instance of a Python environment. Because rhasspy uses the audio resources of the computer indirectly, I went ahead and added the $username to the ‘audio’ group. and then finally set the default shell of the $username to ‘/sbin/nologin’.

username=rhasspy
password=REPLACEWITHYOUROWNPASSWORD

sudo adduser --comment "" --disabled-password $username
sudo chpasswd <<<"$username:$password"
sudo usermod -a -G audio $username
sudo usermod -s /sbin/nologin $username

As is the case with all techno-things this approach will become outdated over time, so check the commands against the current version of Debian or Ubuntu. Drop me a line on Twitter if you find this useful or if needs updating.

Performance Management Programs and Annual Appraisals

Originally posted August 12, 2013. Updated October 20, 2015 with newer data.

Corporations adopting Agile practices on their way towards being Agile often struggle with many legacy operational policies and procedures. One question that always comes up is how to conduct performance management appraisals with employees when Agile Teams are supposed to be Self-Directed, Self-Managed and mostly autonomous? Adobe[1] and Motorola[2] have given us two good examples of successful transformations. Most companies not wanting to jump that far just yet don’t know where to go. This article will cover one of many paths we are exploring/piloting with some of our clients.

The typical scenario we find in organizations is a line manager who is responsible for the management of a team or group of teams, who is also responsible for the career development plans and performance appraisals of the people within those teams or groups. This has always proven to be a fool’s errand for managers. As New York Times[3] columnist Phyllis Korkki notes:

Many businesses feel that they must use formal reviews and rankings to create an objective measurement of performance and goals, so that managers can reward and promote good employees, and give poorly performing ones a chance to improve (while creating a paper trail in case they must be dismissed).

Making matters worse, in the mid–90s, a popular system for front-line employees emerged from GE’s Jack Welch which
stated that employees should be lined up along a three-piece bell curve: the top 20% would get rewarded, the middle 70% would be told how to improve, and the bottom 10% would be discarded. This is called forced or stack ranking; according to an in-depth Vanity Fair report[4], it’s the system that “crippled” Microsofts ability to innovate.

The system at Microsoft, pitted employees against one another in an attempt to reward the best and weed out the rest. However, the system back-fired. Former employees have been quoted[5] as feeing helpless and rewarded to “backstab their co-workers.” Bill Hill, a former manager, is quoted in Fast Company Magazine as saying, ”I wanted to build a team of people who would work together and whose only focus would be on making great software. But you can’t do that at Microsoft.”[6]

It is also the system still used by many of our clients and the reason why we find their cultures lacking innovation, trust, and employee engagement. We are finding the very behavior illustrated in the 2006 MIT study[7] that stated, “… the rigid distribution of the bell curve forces managers to label a high performer as a mediocre. A high performer, unmotivated by such artificial demotion, behaves like a mediocre.”

Motorola had a similar stack-ranking system which they dropped in 2013. Then CEO Greg Brown, noted in Crain’s Business Journal[8] that, “People had an unbelievable focus on their rating. So we decided to forget the rating and just link performance to pay more directly. You no longer have a forced bell curve, which can be demoralizing and can create a culture of infighting.”

Fortunately for Microsoft, stack-ranking was dismantled in late 2013/early 2014. Not so for Yahoo, which decided in the same time period to adopt stack-ranking. Yahoo later backed-off of stack ranking but it appears it has had a lasting effect. One of many bad decisions that have had a lasting effect. Motorola also made a number of mistakes too. They linked performance to pay, which the Federal Reserve study quoted in Dan Pink’s book, Drive, showed is largely a disincentive for most knowledge workers.

Which company is doing well? Microsoft is turning around. Yahoo is on life-support as of this writing. Motorola has had to sell-off most of its business units at fire-sale rates leaving only a former shell of itself to struggle to compete in the commercial and defense communications markets.

At face value, it was never the annual performance review that was the problem. It was that the line manager that didn’t do a great job of ensuring the context, contents and resulting rewards matched reality. Very few line managers have the line-of-sight to knowledge workers daily lives. Complicating the matter is the very definition of a knowledge worker: someone that knows more about a domain then their manager. Now ask that very same line manager to stack-rank their reports. The results have largely been disastrous. Using a system meant for judging the performance of factory work in the early 1900s, we attempted to adapt it to services organizations and knowledge work when we should have just replaced it entirely.

Some companies attempted to do just that in the 1990s recognizing the new era of knowledge work. In the 1990s it emerged as a method for reviewing and improving the performance of managers. It has been extended and used with employees at all levels.

My favorite commentary on the 360 Review comes from PerformanceAppraisals.org. In their article[9] on the “Strengths of 360-Degree Feedback Schemes” they state:

The 360-degree feedback process involves collecting information about performance from multiple sources or multiple raters. For example, a review of a manager’s performance might involve collecting data, opinions, and observations from his or her employees, immediate supervisor, colleagues, and even customers. A review of an employee without supervisory responsibilities might entail eliciting the perceptions of his or her supervisor, customers, and colleagues. Typically those perceptions are collected using a rating system, so in a sense 360-degree feedback is a subset of the ratings method, with all the advantages and drawbacks of any rating system.

The theory makes sense. If you want to improve performance, you can learn more by taking into account the perspectives of a number of “involved parties,” rather than only the perspective of the employee’s immediate supervisor. The implementation, however, is problematic.

Clouding the issue considerably is that the sale of 360- degree feedback instruments, particularly computer-based tools to make the process easier, has become a huge and very lucrative business. Because of the amount of money involved in the industry, there’s a huge level of hyperbole and a lot of exaggerated success stories out there. The 360 method has become one of the more common “management fads.” That’s not to say it can’t be useful, but often the problems associated with it are ignored in favor of an unbalanced focus on its strengths.

So what is the company to do when transforming themselves?

The goal should be to get to a system more like what Adobe Systems did in late 2012. They replaced their system with “check ins”. Some companies choose to jump straight to that once they have the basic organizational structures to support agility in place. (e.g. Scrum or Kanban with a Scaled Framework around it like SAFe) Others chose what I’ll outline here.

One option we are seeing happen a lot is the 4-part Performance Review. The review is broken down as follows:

  • Part One: 1/3 of the score is a 360-Review from the team.
  • Part Two: 1/3 of the score is a more traditional regarding career development goals
  • Part Three: 1/6 of the score is the Team’s Performance to all of the delivery metrics (build the thing right and the right cadence)
  • Part Four: 1/6 of the score is the Team’s Performance to all of the Pirate metrics (build the right thing)

The critical piece to make this work is to make sure all of the instrumentation is in place to make quantitative judgements.

Deeper Dive into the Performance Appraisal

To ensure that the performance appraisal is fair and an accurate representation of individual performance to plan, lets first discuss what a Performance Appraisal is and isn’t.

Again, from Performance-appraisals.org, there is a difference between Performance Appraisal and Performance Management. Performance Management. The Performance Appraisal is part of an overall Performance Management program. Where Performance Management is about the entire system of managing the performance of the organization, the performance appraisal is the natural end-point for assessing how an individual did during the performance period. It started with the development of a strategic plan that became and operational plan that became a tactical plan which became an individual development plan (sometimes called a Personal Development Plan or Professional Development Plan).

The performance management program is “an ongoing communication process, undertaken in partnership, between an employee and his or her immediate supervisor that involves establishing clear expectations and understanding”[10] Topics of collaboration should include:

  • the essential responsibilities of the employee
  • how the employee’s job contributes to the goals of the organization
  • what “doing the job well” means in concrete qualitative and quantitative terms such as specific markers for skills mastery using a framework such as the Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition and Bloom’s Taxonomy to inform goals in Hard Skills (Content or Technical Skills) and Core Skills (Soft Skills).
  • how employee and supervisor will work together to sustain, improve, or build on existing employee performance including professional continuing education goals
  • how job performance will be measured (What does below expectations, meets expectations and exceeds expectations really mean?)
  • identifying impediments to performance and removing them

From every work written about Performance Management, it requires regular, two-way dialogue between the performance management (line-manager) and the employee. The emphasis should be on learning and improving.

Note that Performance Management isn’t:

  • something that happens to an employee without their input
  • a means to dictate how a person is to work
  • used only for performance remediation
  • checking the box once a year

If I get some time, I’ll walk through one transition plan to the type of Performance Management program Adobe is using.

HINT: They call them “Check-ins” and it happens almost every week. It kinda sounds like a Retrospective. The 360-degree appraisals should happen once a quarter and be like a private retrospective. If using SAFe, consider using the Program Increment (PI) Inspect and Adapt (I&A) as the point for the 360-degree review and resetting goals.


  1. D. Baer, “Why Adobe Abolished The Annual Performance Review And You Should, Too,” Business Insider, 10-Apr–2014.  ↩
  2. J. Pletz, “The end of ‘valued performers’ at Motorola,” Crain’s Chicago Business, 02-Nov–2013.  ↩
  3. P. Korkki, “Invasion of the Annual Reviews,” The New York Times, Job Market, 23-Nov–2013.  ↩
  4. K. Eichenwald, “How Microsoft Lost Its Mojo: Steve Ballmer and Corporate America’s Most Spectacular Decline,” Vanity Fair, Aug–2012.  ↩
  5. J. Brustein, “Microsoft Kills Its Hated Stack Rankings. Does Anyone Do Employee Reviews Right? – Businessweek,” Bloomberg-Businessweek, 13-Nov–2013.  ↩
  6. D. Baer, “Performance Reviews Don’t Have To Be Absolutely Awful,” FastCompany, 02-Dec–2013.  ↩
  7. C. Vaishnav, A. Khakifirooz, and M. Devos, “Punishing by Rewards: When the Performance Bell-curve Stops Working For You,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, Masters Thesis, 2006.  ↩
  8. J. Pletz, “The end of ‘valued performers’ at Motorola,” Crain’s Chicago Business, 02-Nov–2013.  ↩
  9. Bacal & Associates, “Strengths Of 360-Degree Feedback Schemes,” The Performance Management & Appraisal Resource Center.  ↩
  10. Bacal & Associates, “What Performance Management ‘Is’ And ‘Isn’t,’” The Performance Management & Appraisal Resource Center.  ↩

The Awesome Singh Estimation Technique (TASET)

Introduction

I spoke to the DC Scrum Users Group this topic around a year ago and wanted to unleash this virus on the world. The Awesome Singh Estimation Technique (TASET) is a technique learned from Alex Singh and honed over the course of two years while working with BigVisisble’s clients and recently while working with my own clients at ResultLinq Associates.

The Problem

Managers in every business and from every walk of life always ask the same questions when it comes to Product Development and IT projects: How long is going to take and how much is it going to cost?

When teams are learning relative sizing (estimation) of work items (user stories) it takes some time for the team to get good at estimations. {> Horrible sentence structure <} Traditional methods of estimation consistently fail teams in the early stages of adopting Agile product development practices and are often abandoned in the absence of managerial support. Intellectually, managers understand that it takes a team a while to develop the skills that enables accurate forecasts of feature delivery. {> I should write a blog about the futility of attempting to forecast more than 3 months into the future without having a large enough data pool to use for estimation. <}

There are several approaches to answer this question when employing Agile product development techniques, but at the heart of every approach are two principles:

  • Humans are terrible at estimating effort and complexity of work products [^1]:
  • Teams can only predict once they have a consistent record of estimating effort and complexity [^2]

I’ve run into the problem of estimating time and again when working with organizations adopting the Agile way to product delivery.

What I’ve tried

Many teams adopt the concept of story points and use Mike Cohn’s approach of planning poker. This works really well for a lot of people, but I’ve struggled with teams needing to get “stable” with their estimations as quickly as possible due to management pressure to answer the above question in the absence of mature adaptive management of product delivery and lean thinking.

Techniques I’ve tried are:

  • Using Story Points and Planning Poker
  • T-Shirt Sizes (Extra-Small, Small, Medium, Medium Large, Large, Extra Large, etc.)
  • Using Ideal Man Days
  • Using 3-Factor Hour Estimation (PERT): Optimal, Normal, Pessimistic
  • Story Point estimation + Hourly Estimates on Tasks
  • Using Scrumban’s Cycle Time, Lead Time, Lag Time estimates

Alex to the rescue

Unfortunately, none of these techniques helped me get a team stable at estimating very quickly. Fortunately, my BigVisible colleague, Alex Singh, shared a nice derivative technique that allows me to focus the team on execution while taking care of the problems associated with relative sizing using story points.

Estimating using TASET

The person facilitating the estimation session starts by creating cards as column labels and placing them horizontally on a wall to be used for the estimating exercise. The labels are:

  • Piece of Cake
  • Easy
  • Moderate
  • Somewhat Hard
  • Hard
  • Very Difficult
  • Extreme But Known, and
  • Extreme and Unknown 

At the same time, the person responsible for User Story creation and elaboration (typically a Business Analyst or the Product Owner) should have the stories in order of priority from highest business value to lowest business value.

TIP: Place a small number on each card to indicate the prioritization relative to the other cards (e.g. BV1 BV2, .. , BVn).

When the session begins, starting with the first story, the person responsible for the first story explains the first story to the team members who will be performing the work. Using the round-robin selection approach, the first team member places the user story in the column matching the size most closely matching their estimate for the story and then explains the rationale for their estimate. Then the next team member takes the same story and either agrees with the estimate or moves it to the column most closely matching their estimate and explains why they did or did not move it. In a similar manner, each team member repeats this process until all team members have had a chance to re-estimate and explain their rationale. You now have a baseline story to use relative estimation sizing.

The next story is explained by the Product Owner.

Estimate the size of a user story relative to similar stories in previous products and releases with each person by first explaining which previous product and release they are using for comparison and then placing that story under the appropriate column heading.

This should be specfiic for each of the delivery groups in the room. The Business Analyst or the Product Owner then explains the stories in order of priority from highest value to lowest value to the business. The track/team lead then facilitates moving the first story to the appropriate column heading (estimate) based on relative size to some previous story from either the previous iteration, is there was one, or previous release, if there was one.

Applying the Technique

  1. Build the Estimation Wall
  2. Find the Smallest Story
  3. Find a Representative Story for Each Relative Size
  4. Walk Through Each Story, discussing as a team the acceptance criteria, the approach to solving for the Acceptance Criteria, and Risks/Dependencies
  5. Poll the team which representative story already on the wall the Story belongs with
  6. After placing the story in the estimation column, ask the team for a confidence vote (Fist of Five) that they got that right.
  7. Adjust the estimation based on the Team’s response
  8. Repeat until all Stories are estimated
  9. Ask for a final confidence vote by the team
  10. Adjust the estimation based on the Team’s response

Why it works

Using relative sizing is to use a scale that activates two levels of the brain, the pre-frontal cortex where we make relational decisions and the basal ganglia where previous experience exists. Often sizes and number confuse a team as it is difficult for a team to pin-down what a size or number really means. This method uses yesterday’s weather in a meaningful and adds a Plan-Do-Check-Act feedback loop so that teams can get to good, reliable estimates within the second or third iteration.

Some other ways to do it

I often have to work with disbursed or distributed teams. When I do, I’ve used a spreadsheet where we collaborate on finding the relative sizes using columns in the spreadsheet. It takes time and patience. I’ve had better luck using Google Sheets where everyone can work on a Sheet at the same time. I’ve heard rumors that Microsoft is working on something similar, and there are plug-ins that are being added by the moment to Rally, VersionOne or Jira.

Why I predict the 2013 Mac Pro will be DOA

Mac Pro, Mac keyboard, Mac cup, Mac iPod Class...
Mac Pro, Mac keyboard, Mac cup, Mac iPod Classic, Mac iPod Nano, Mac iPod Shuffle, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Apple gave us another look at the 2013 Mac Pro this week at the update release announcement for the iPad line. Today another person noted what I’ve been mulling over for some time: the interesting design is missing two major features that will keep it out of the hands of a lot of video, audio and graphics professionals. You know… the target market for that machine?

The three big features are:

  1. Upgradability: If I can’t put the video or audio cards that I already have in it or can’t install newer versions of the same cards the the system has no use to me. Examples are:
  2. Rackmountable: If I can’t put the workstation in a server half-rack, which most studios and live production crews use, then the workstation will need a custom installation in a space where space is a premium and there are already standards for such things.
  3. External storage: SAS Drive array cards to connect to MiniSAS and SAS Desktop Video Drive Arrays for HD and 4K Video editing. Examples are the PROAVIO, Sonnet and Promise desktop and rackmount solutions.

My point. Apple’s Mac Pro looks pretty, but professionals don’t buy machines to look pretty. We all bought Macs because they were the best functional machine I never had to think about. It just worked and anything designed for it just worked. It may be that Apple is banking on the expanded use of the Lightning Bolt port, but most professionals, self included, don’t need more cables and junk lying around. Also, there are limits to the Lightning Bolt port that can only be overcome with Bus Speeds. Live rendering all those pretty graphics you see in sports shows is a perfect example.

This may be the end of my journey with Apple hardware for a while until Apple realizes how badly they are alienating the Pro Media community.

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Review of Writing Kit for iPad

Writing Kit for iPadI’ve started using Writing Kit for writing on the iPad a lot more often these days. It supports Markdown, Dropbox sync, has an integrated Browser with DuckDuckGo as one of the integrated search engines. It is distraction free. All-in-all, it is as close as I’ve came to having the perfect on-the-go, in-the-moment everywhere writing tool. It even includes limited integration with Instapaper and Readability. There are three key features that prevent this from being THE perfect writing tool. They are:

  • Two-way integration with Evernote
  • Integrated Zotero client
  • Ability to write sections of documents and stitch them together, re-organize them, and compile them into a final document.

The work-arounds that I have used so far have been as follows:

For Evernote references — I either hot-swap to Evernote for iPad and use the “share link” feature to grab a reference to a specific note, or using the browser integrated into Writing Kit to navigate to Evernote’s web client to grab the link to an Evernote entry. Then I paste the link into my document using Writing Kit’s Markup or Insert Link tool. It is a pain in the neck and still doesn’t give me what I want. What I want is to be able to open an Evernote window in a side-tray (Blogsy style), high-light a section of text and insert the text into my Writing Kit document with the link to where that text came from automatically generated for me.

For Zotero — This would be the holy-grail of iPad functionality. What I would like is to open the integrated browser for researching a topic, highlight text in web pages or pdfs, send the bibliographic information along with the captured text to Zotero, be prompted for a description and note about the reference, AND capture the web reference in a specified Evernote note. Then inside my Writing Kit doc, be able to open a Zotero Client in a side-tray (Blogsy style), search for a find a reference, insert the quoted text, insert the note I made about the text, and maintain a markdown link to the Zotero record so that it can be compiled into an inline reference and Bibliography section when I’m ready to compile the document for “print” (usually a blog post or PDF white-paper).

For writing sections and document compilation — I’ll just say, I want to mimic a watered down version of the functionality of Scrivener for Mac and leave it at that.

Overall, though, I am really happy with Writing Kit. I’ve tried Pages, Plain Text, Plainnote, iA Writer, TextTastic, WriteRoom*, and others. I’m looking at Editorial next, but you can only throw down so much bank before you realize there should be a way to get a “free 30-day trial” before being required to buy an app in Apple App Store. That, of course, is a topic for another time.

*NOTE: I really love WriteRoom and OmmWriter for Mac. My favorite of the two is OmmWriter because of the Zen-Like interface, inspirational backgrounds and meditative music. I once got up from writing using OmmWriter and was in deep pain because I had been sitting for over two hours “in-the-zone” and hadn’t realized my back and legs were numb.

Further Reading on the Topic:
*10 Awesome iPad Writing Apps
*Make Your iPad A True Writing Tool With These Notebook Apps
*The art and science of writing on an iPad
*8 iPad Apps for Brilliant Writing
*Review: “Writing On The iPad: Text Automation with Editorial” is a textbook for iOS automation
*The Novelist’s iPad: 10 Apps for Writers
*The 10 best writing apps on the iPad
*Why I’m writing on the iPad
Editorial, iPad Writing Re-Imagined

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NFL and ESPN leaving money on the table?

Continue reading NFL and ESPN leaving money on the table?

Essential Travel Tools for iPhone and iPad

A close friend recently asked me if I liked TripIt after he noticed the automated posts of my travel plans. This came on the heals of almost a year of constant business travel, so I figured I would give back my tips for the Road Warriors out there trying to remember what city and time zone they are in… trying to get back home to their loved ones without getting all wrapped around the travel arrangement axel.

Kayak for iPhone and iPad

Kayak for iPad
Kayak for iPad

First stop is my chief means of flights of fancy and those homes away from home. The Kayak iPhone and iPad apps are extensions to the powerful online site that harvests deals from Priceline, Expedia, Hotwire, Travelocity, and CheapOair for airline tickets. They also have hooks into hotel sites, car rentals and cruises. The only thing they don’t have is the ability to book tickets on Amtrak.

The thing I like about Kayak is that you can set alerts on fare changes and cheap hotel deals. Kayak combined with the next app has saved me hundreds of dollars over the last year in refunds, vouchers and opportunities to save money.

TripIt Pro for iDevices

TripIt Pro for iPad
TripIt Pro for iPad

Next stop on this journey of travel apps is TripIt Pro. Like Kayak, TripIt Pro is first a Web-based app and the mobile apps for iDevices works in tandem with the mothership.

I use TripIt Pro for itinerary management, awards points tracking and price alerts (I’ve found out about price drops on flights I’ve already booked and received vouchers for the difference.) It also gives me flight info and has quickly told me about alternate flights when I had a flight delayed or cancelled. It also integrates with my calendar and email. It picks up email reservations, logs it in my itinerary, and then puts the event on my calendar. And all of my colleagues use it to know who is in what town on what dates: it also broadcasts this info on our corporate IM feed (Yammer.com). It posts general travel plans to LinkedIn and Facebook in the form of “Devin is preparing to leave for… ” and “Devin is returning to DC from …”. As an added bonus, I can designate people like close friends and my lovely wife as members of my Inner Circle. These members get look at the intimate details of any itinerary. Finally, I can always see my itinerary on my iDevice either through the app or through integration with my calendar.

TripIt also has a version for businesses. I and my colleagues have floated the idea of subscribing to this so that it is easy to coordinate pair-coaching opportunities as we float about the World.

FlightTrack Pro

FlightTrack Pro for iPhone
FlightTrack Pro for iPhone

I use FlightTrack Pro for gate information, flight delays, alternate flights, navigation around airports, weather delays, etc. It pulls my flight information directly from TripIt Pro (tight integration). I get notified of delays and gate changes typically before the majority of the crowd (including the gate employees), and can switch flights before the crowd has even figured out what is going on. Another nice thing about combining FlightTrack Pro with TripIt Pro is that I can invite my inner circle from TripIt Pro to view my trips. Then they can know when to meet me at the airport using FlightTrack Pro on thier iDevice. I also love that I can view the map of an airport that I’m not familiar with before I get there and know how to get through the maze of terminals and concourses without looking like a mouse that has lost its cheese.

TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor for iPhone and iPad
TripAdvisor for iPhone and iPad

Another one of my essential iDevice travel apps is TripAdvisor. The TripAdvisor is just a better interface for my mobile device with their Webapp as the back-end. It allows me to find and read reviews of hotels, restaurants, and venues using either an address or geolocation. The app is also integrated with TripIt Pro so I can go from the address in my itinerary to TripAdvisor to find out other places around that address. When combined with the online Webapp, I can monitor airfares between locations that I frequent. I can also check for alternate hotels if I find the one I booked has suddenly had an outbreak of Bed Bugs.

Honorable Mentions:

Bed Bug Tracker

Bed Bug Tracker for iPhone
Bed Bug Tracker for iPhone

I’ve now tacked this one onto my essential travel apps as I have started visiting cities where there are Bed Bug problems in the hotels. So far this app hasn’t failed me. Eventually I need to write a blog about my one and only bed bug experience. I never want to experience that again. That was before a colleague referred me to this app. Now I check this app every time I go to make a reservation.

Egencia/Expedia TripAssist

Expedia TripAssist for iPhone
Expedia TripAssist for iPhone

I’ve been using Egencia for work related travel for a couple months now. It really isn’t that great, but it is worth a mention because when flights are cancelled, changed or when a hotel messes up my reservation or overbooks, I can simply use the app itself to autodial customer service to fix everything for me.

 

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Getting started with Applescript

AppleScriptI’ve started writing quite a bit more lately. My tools of choice are OmmWriter for short pieces or parts of larger projects, a specific playlist in iTunes, Apimac Timer (to timebox myself), and Scrivener for larger projects. Me being lazy in a productive way, I was looking for a way to just lauch and setup all of the above for writing with a short couple QuickSilver keystrokes. Enter Applescript. In order to make it all work, I had to first LEARN enough Applescript to pull it all together. That is where this site came in handy for learning the basics of Applescript. I’ll grab a quick video later that shows how it all works, but for now, enjoy learning how to automate a lot of the repetitive things you do everyday.

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Two Mail.app plug-ins all Exchange users need

Mail.app
Mail.app

If you are using Mail.app with with MS Exchange, you know the frustration of sending attachments and opening those dreaded winmail.dat files (the sender sent a MS Exchange email file as an attachment). Grr.

To get around dealing with Microsoft’s refusal to comply with email standards, I recommend two mail.app plug-ins:
Lokiware’s Attachment Tamer and Christopher Atlan’s Letter Opener Pro. Both programs will end the your MS Exchange email attachment problems. Here’s what they do:

Attachment Tamer (from the Lokiware product description):

  • Display (and print) images, PDFs, audio and video as icons with an optional file size limit and exceptions;
  • Send messages compatible with Microsoft Outlook, Exchange and other software, preventing the superfluous “ATT0001” attachments;
  • Send images as regular attachments, making it easier for the recipient to manipulate the image files;
  • Send images embedded in HTML layout and safely mix embedded images with other attachments;
  • Display full attachment names regardless of length instead of truncated names;
  • Automatically display attachments at the top of messages;
  • Prevent unwanted image resizing or set a default size for automatic image resizing.

Letter Opener Pro:

  • Allows Browser addachment of a winmail.dat file
  • Adds the capability to add appointments contained in winmail.dat files directly to iCal
  • Adds the capability to create contacts contained in winmail.dat files directly in Address Book
  • Adds the capability to display those dreaded nested messages
  • Allows you to convert attached winmail.dat Outlook Notes to plain text
  • And reads and delivers MS Exchange receipts (for those nutbags that subscribe to Level 3 Leadership)

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