...by Matt Galligan

Hey girl, want to go for a drive? with Anne, lane, and Heidi at...

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:43:52 -0700

Hey girl, want to go for a drive? with Anne, lane, and Heidi at Golden Gate Park Panhandle – View on Path.

Bay to Breakers. Best party in San Francisco all year. – View on...

Sun, 19 May 2013 10:39:46 -0700

Bay to Breakers. Best party in San Francisco all year. – View on Path.

Mr. Hydrant Face

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:58:51 -0700

Mr. Hydrant Face

Blown away by even just the first track of this record....

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:47:53 -0700

Blown away by even just the first track of this record. I’ve been anxiously awaiting its release. If you were a child of the 80s, a fan of video game music, and just like tunes that make you feel good, this is your jam.

Always be charging. at Apple Store – View on Path.

Sat, 11 May 2013 17:56:30 -0700

Always be charging. at Apple Store – View on Path.

Photo

Thu, 02 May 2013 16:43:59 -0700

A beautiful night on the boardwalk at Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 18:21:21 -0700

A beautiful night on the boardwalk at Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk – View on Path.

This dog is awesome. I shall call him Gandalf.

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:52:12 -0700

This dog is awesome. I shall call him Gandalf.

Crazy or crazy awesome? A week long business trip with no laptop...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 07:56:20 -0700

I’m on a flight back to San Francisco after spending a week in New York on business. But something was different about this trip that I’ve never done for anything outside of vacation: I didn’t bring my laptop. Some of you might think that I’m positively insane for having done that, especially considering that it’s a business trip. But the conclusion of my experiment didn’t surprise me: I didn’t miss my laptop at all.

For this trip, along with my iPhone I brought my iPad mini with the matching Logitech keyboard case. My reasoning was simple: my laptop provides me with so much distraction and with the right apps, I can accomplish most everything I need to on my iPad or iPhone. Plus, there are many advantages to this setup.

Last Tuesday I flew Virgin America to JFK, using the WiFi the whole time and accomplishing a crazy amount of tasks, mostly email. The trip was a little less than five hours and I was using my iPad the entire time. Normally this would have crushed even the most lengthy laptop battery, but I landed with 58% battery still remaining so day one was a wild success.

Wednesday I presented my company Circa, at the paidContent Live conference. I didn’t have to have my laptop present as I just emailed my slides in prior, but even if I did need to present from my own machine, I already had the appropriate connectors for my iPad mini. There was one moment prior to the conference where I needed to make a change to my presentation and send it in. Even though I don’t have a fully fledged version of Keynote on my iPad mini, I was able to use Screens VNC and over LTE dial back to my computer at home. The changes were made remotely, uploaded to Dropbox, downloaded onto my iPad and then emailed in. Easy.

Thursday I was running around NYC a lot to different meetings, so the added portability that the iPad gave me was very welcomed. I have a small sling bag that it fits beautifully in along with all of the necessary accessories. But the big difference here is that it’s small, slim, and doesn’t get in the way while traveling around – and it’s amazingly light to boot. I’d consider this day a success too.

Friday was the Lerer Ventures CEO Summit (Circa is a portfolio company of theirs). During the presentations there were a few moments that I needed to get a bit of work done here and there. In any other scenario, if I pulled out my laptop it would be almost guaranteed that I’d get sucked in and barely pay attention to the presentations. But instead, the iPad granted me the ability to quickly open it up, get the tasks done, and close it all without any additional distraction. That way I could pay attention to some of the fantastic speakers Lerer brought in, like Newark Mayor Corey Booker and Statistician Nate Silver.

Saturday was going to be a bit more of a chill day. Even though I still had a few other meetings to take care of, I found a few times to just sit and hang out. In the morning, I shacked up at a coffee shop for a while and got a ton of work done. Then after those meetings and hanging out with a few friends, I killed sometime at a quiet bar, cranking out on email over a beer. I’m not sure that in that situation, I’d have felt at all comfortable just dragging out my MacBook Pro casually. Let alone lug it around all day.

Now I’m on a 7:30a flight back to San Francisco and I’m typing up this blog post in iA Writer which goes full screen with no menus or anything, allowing me to focus on the task at hand.

All in all, this whole week I never missed my laptop. Ever. Though I should mention it was also relieving to know that at any moment if I might need the capabilities of my MacBook it was only one remote connection away. It’s likely that I’ll conduct future trips in this manner, as the sacrifices I made by leaving my machine at home were greatly outweighed by the convenience the iPad brought me.

A beautiful day in NYC to sit outside and enjoy a cup of joe at...

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 08:31:55 -0700

A beautiful day in NYC to sit outside and enjoy a cup of joe at Think Coffee – View on Path.

I like popping into random bars in NYC for a drink by myself....

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 17:23:28 -0700

I like popping into random bars in NYC for a drink by myself. Great people watching. at Peculier Pub – View on Path.

Baby hipster denim at Jean Shop – View on Path.

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:00:29 -0700

Baby hipster denim at Jean Shop – View on Path.

NYC is blossoming – View on Path.

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 08:24:11 -0700

NYC is blossoming – View on Path.

Time to head back to SF at Los Angeles International Airport...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 16:33:38 -0700

Time to head back to SF at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) – View on Path.

The things you see in Venice, CA…

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:54:08 -0700

The things you see in Venice, CA…

If you’re looking for a song to put you in an amazing...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 14:26:00 -0700

If you’re looking for a song to put you in an amazing mood, look no further.

“Wild” by the Royal Teeth

This sea lion may be the first non-human mammal to exhibit the...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:57:04 -0700

This sea lion may be the first non-human mammal to exhibit the ability to keep a beat along with music.

Get down, Mr. Sea Lion!

New cable transmits data at 99.7% the speed of light, using air as the medium

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 11:38:21 -0700

New cable transmits data at 99.7% the speed of light, using air as the medium:

Holy smokes!

How did my Google Reader logo become the "default"?

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 09:41:00 -0700

Five years ago, I was wanting to install Google Reader on my desktop with Fluid but noticed I couldn’t find a good icon for it at all. So I made one, and posted it to Flickr. I didn’t have any expectation when I posted it to Flickr – just that other people that wanted to have it could use it. A while later I stopped using Google Reader and forgot about this whole thing altogether.

Fast forward to now and Google Reader is getting shut down.

Note: Google Reader does have an official logo, and it looks like this:

So the big question for me was, how did my icon become the “default” one? I’m seeing it in so many blog posts now that Google Reader is getting shut down, as well as the fact that it’s also on the Wikipedia page for Google Reader. Here’s how I stumbled upon my own image:

How did this happen?

My only theory has to do with Google Image search. If you were to search for “Google Reader” there it looks something like this:

So the first image is some semi-fake looking logo, that is basically a combination of the official Google Reader logo, and the Google logo. What’s the second? My icon. What would most journalists probably grab? The slightly less fake-looking one.

Creative Commons, oh well?

What’s a bit of a bummer around all of this is that our remix culture has gotten ahold of this image and there’s basically no tracing it back to the original anymore. Even the Wikipedia page says that somehow it’s the “official” logo and copyright of Google. Now, I don’t particularly care but it should be noted that my original posting of this image was listed as Creative Commons: Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works. I only randomly happened upon seeing my own image elsewhere because of all of the big news around Google Reader. So what about all of the images that are out there, getting copied and derivative works made from every day? Something tells me this is going to be a really tough issue going forward.

UPDATE: I have since changed the original image’s Creative Commons license to CC-BY-SA.

For now, I’ll just be the unnamed creator behind the official unofficial Google Reader logo.

An entire QWERTY keyboard, on just one line. Type super fast and...

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 11:44:00 -0700

An entire QWERTY keyboard, on just one line. Type super fast and don’t sacrifice screen real estate. Now this is cool.

Minuum Keyboard