Maybe.

But so far, we’re not there yet. The best bicycle seats money can buy have been made by Brooks Saddles pretty much the same way since 1866. Their flagship model for first appeared in the 1898 catalog! Sure, the process has probably been improved, but the widget is pretty much the same.

I first learned about brooks saddles through people who have been touring the world by bike since 2002. They have much more experience than me and claimed it is the best bike seat. The people at the bike shop agree. When I asked a guy “would you ride across the country if you weren’t using your brooks saddle?” He said no.

In a world where newer is better. It’s refreshing to see something old be the best there is.

Today, I replaced my b0rk3d hacked iPhone with a new one from Apple. Here’s how I did it.

1. Put the AT&T sim card back in the phone
2. Restore the iPhone to 1.1.2
3. Get pre-auth code from an AT&T store (if needed)
4. Activate on AT&T
   
5. Whoops, it looks like the phone functionality needs to work to activate
   
6. Make an appointment with the Apple Store
7. Say something like – “I bought it a while ago but it’s been in the box”
8. Get replacement phone (now activated)
9. Return home with new iPhone

At this point, you can choose whether or not you want to stick with AT&T, or go back to your old provider. I decided to give them a shot and port my number over. Here’s why:

• There is a delay in getting new features on a hacked phone
• Recracking the phone after each update is a pain
• Visual voicemail seems cool?
• The cost saving on t-mobile was $10 a month (after the $175 cancellation fee).
• The hassle factor of being wholly responsible for the well-being of my phone is annoying.
• I can always crack it again if I want to use it overseas on someone other than AT&T

Time will tell if this was the right decision!

Clearer desk, clearer mind.

Basically, the way it should work is: if I read it on my phone, my laptop, my desktop or the web, it should be marked as read everywhere. You couldn’t do this out of the box.

I took a crazy approach to making this happen. One weekend, I set up my own IMAP server on my Slicehost server and downloaded my mail to my slice. I then connected all devices to that IMAP server.

Well, someone else though that was a good idea. Google. Finally, google has started providing IMAP for Gmail. Check out these instructions on how to set up IMAP for Gmail on your iPhone

If you still don’t get why IMAP is cool, check out this diagram comparing POP and IMAP.

I heard about this first on TUAW

T-mobile also sells hotspot access for $19.99 a month, but you’d have to be stupid to pay for that. I switched from my blackberry data plan (also $19.99) to t-mobile Total internet with no hassles, and no problems. When you call up, t-mobile can tell you’re using an iPhone and generally the staff there is pretty interested in helping you get the most out of your iPhone on t-mobile.

I’ve added it to my “Get Social” section on the sidebar. The post-facebook internet starts with this little tag. Through it, you can identify me on all the sites I use around the web. If you can learn about me through those sites (or a mashup) without going to facebook, why use facebook?

The secret formula

1. Add rel=”me” to every website and individual
2. ……. (there’s stuff in my head to fill in #2)
3. Profit!

Granted, rel=”me” doesn’t provide any immediate benefit. It does however put the infrastructure in place to replace little walled zuckerberg gardens with vast, beautiful, digital rainforests.

Here’s the gist:
BUG: An open source, web-enabled, modular software + hardware platform.

Whaaaaa? let me rephrase that. BUG is lego for tech geeks. You can swap in and swap out different components to make the BUG be what you want it to be. GPS, motion sensors, touch screen LCD. These guys are trying to make the ultimate consumer / prosumer customizable device.

Possible applications:
When is the last time you thought about reprogramming your GPS to take pictures every 100 ft you travel. With a BUG, you “could” do that. The interesting thing for me will be when other people figure out cool things to do. I’m great at following walk-throughs on how to do cool things, but I’m not going to hack into a BUG to build my own custom devices. I want a device that will turn on my favorite music when I walk from room to room. Or start the coffee pot when I start to wake up.

The BUG could be the beginning of a revolution towards end-user built hardware devices. These will enrich and empower our lives in ways we have not thought of yet. It’s a great start. I don’t think the BUG is that revolution quite yet. Let’s wait and see when it comes out at the end of this year.

Web 1.0 was all about buying 100 servers and having your own techs in data centers. How big was your rack? Companies today are moving to VPS providers like Slicehost. VPS have a fantastic role in providing hosting for your small to medium site (like this one). But what about if you want to build the next facebook? One of the presenters at Amazon’s AWS event “The Start-up Project” showed us this chart:

Pretty scary! This is daily pageviews as a percentage of total pageviews on the internet. As you can see, facebook just destroys CNN and Flickr. Amazon AWS tries to answer the question: How do I scale like facebook!

The alternative to Amazon AWS

One alternative to Amazon is to buy space in a data center and fill a rack with servers in anticipation of users. This is a lesson that was learned by one of the guys in Betahouse at a previous startup. They bought a bunch of servers for customers that never came. What a great way to burn money! The other alternative is to try and scale using VPS providers like slicehost. You’re going to hit some technical difficulties pretty quickly and have to solve the problems amazon already has.

Amazon provides a solution for starting small and scaling big if and when you need it. How many other companies let you pay for 10 extra servers for only 8 hours during peak time in the US when everyone is at the office? If you know others that do, let me know!

I’ll dive into some of the various technologies in later articles. For now, you need to know that you can build a site to take over the world and your starting cost will be $72 a month + data transfer.

Want to win some money using AWS?

Check out “The Startup Project“. Amazon is offering some cold hard cash for companies to use their services.

I currently am in the process of backing up 30gb of information. My big problem is that I am using Comcast at the office and at home which means slooooow upload speeds.

People often ignore the value of offsite backup. What happens if your harddrive dies. What happens if your house burns down. As we rely more and more on digital data, a service like Mozy becomes essential.

Mozy makes it easy to select what you want backed up. Once you’re ready to back up, Mozy gets the job done with little work from you!

The reason I chose Mozy over others is because of their deal with GE . If mozy is good enough for GE, it’s good enough for me.

Try it, you’ll like it

On Tuesday I was thinking to myself that I should really get an iPhone. I get annoyed trying to sync my Blackberry to my Mac. Not everything transfers properly. With the iPhone, everything will be smooth. I enviously gazed at Dan Choi’s iPhone during the day and thought about getting one in the next few days. I gave my roommate Ben a call as I was leaving work. He said “Guess what?”. What? “I got an iPhone! It rocks.” I thought to myself “this is meant to be. Im getting one now”. I told him I would be home in a few and swung by AT&T – just steps from the office.

$399+ tax later, I walked out with my iPhone.

Before there was a snazzy installer, Ben and I spent the evening going through the step by step process to unlock our iphones

5:45 pm – I arrive home
6:45 pm – I purchase an unlock key from one of iPhoneSimFree resellers
6:47 pm – Ben tells me we’re on the verge of a free alternative!
7:30 pm – We throw on James Bond – Live & Let Die
7:56 pm – Sim unlock source code released
9:00 pm – Application released & Ben and I start looking at how to do it
10:30 pm – I copy a file over that causes my iPhone to freeze!
11:05 – I fix it
12:15 pm – My iPhone unlocked

I’m now running the iPhone on t-mobile using my blackberry unlimited data plan (wap.voicestream.com , no user / pass to get on the data network). It rocks. Is anyone else out there running an unlocked iPhone?