Spill a little coffee on a brown paper bag and you get this:

Nice (but a little blurry) ‘coffee stain’ social media icons:

Nice looking cup of coffee with some other icons:

Another coffee stain:

An icon set in coffee brown:

Coffee cup RSS icon from Smashing along with a few others:

Coffee cup on a folder (hey how about newspaper instead?):

There are loads of combinations of these breakfast icons everywhere but they are pretty nice:

Some more nice breakfast icons:

Nice icon set, including a cup of java sitting on a coffee stain:

Big cup of coffee:

A bunch of 31 coffee icons:

But today, it’s pretty simple and quick, and there are some really cool benefits and very little downside.

In case you are in a hurry, I’ll show you how first, and then tell you why.

How To Jailbreak iPhone 3.0

I had 3.12 on an iPhone 3G, so this is the result I got from that setup.

First you download the program, use Blackra1n since it’s so easy and quick. Get it here.

Once you have the program on your computer, you simply plugin the iPhone and hit a button that shows up that says “Make It Rain”. About 3 minutes later, you have a jailbroken iPhone with a few different app stores available, including the most popular, called Cydia.

Why I Jailbroke My iPhone 3.0? Benefits!

Ok, first of all, it’s not everything to jailbreak your iPhone.

Yes there are some cool additions to what you can do on your iPhone, and some customization that makes it a good deal. But is it going to make you a lot more productive? I’m not sure I can really say that. Will it make your iPhone experience a little more fun? Definitely on that one …

The first thing when I jailbroke my iPhone is I had a few new apps showing up. One was blackra1n, and there was also Cydia, and Winterboard. Winterboard is used to activate and deactivate a lot of themes and tweaks. And it runs on something called Springboard. Springboard crashes occasionally and you have to reboot. But I’ve had other apps that crashed me before, so it does not seem like a big deal to me.

Going into Cydia, there are loads of apps to browse. The immediate difference is that it’s not as pretty as the Apple App store on the phone. The icons don’t show you anything about the program, and you have to wait for it to load before getting a screenshot or two. Most Apple app store apps have several screenshots, but the Cydia ones usually have only one screenshot. This might not seem like a big deal, but if you like to see how the theme or tweak is going to look first, it’s a bit annoying.

However, I’ve found a few Cydia apps that are total deal makers for me …

One is qTweeter. If you use twitter or Facebook, this is a really awesome app. It costs $5, but it’s a totally cool way to update both twitter and facebook at the same time. You get 15 free status updates before you have to pay for the app. So plenty of time to test it out before you have to pay. Very nice touch. I never would buy an app for $5 without being able to try it first unless I was really confident. The app uses twitpic and twitvid to automatically generate short links and show your pic or video in your status update. This rocks … Another cool thing about qTweeter is that you can update your status, from anywhere. Just touch the status bar on the top of the screen and qTweeter drops a window down, over any app or the homescreen. This is something that is unheard of on an iPhone that isn’t jailbroken. You just can’t do stuff like that.

Another app that is totally cool is Cycorder. If you already have an iPhone 3GS, you don’t need this app. But I have a 3G. So no video recorder preloaded. Cycorder turns your 3G into a video recorded, just like a 3GS. And the really cool thing is that qTweeter can automatically generate a video and load it on twitvid. WAY cool. So these two programs together make it easy to update the Twitter status.

There are other apps that some friends of mine keep saying I have to try, like a scrabble-type of game that you can play online. But I have yet to try it.

Themes are maybe the #1 reason to jailbreak your iPhone. If making your phone look and feel unique, then jailbreak and get your theme. There are hundreds to choose from and many of them come in parts, so you can use the battery from one theme and the background from another, for example. During my first week I changed the theme nonstop. Now I have the one I like. Screenshot coming soon … my wife has my phone today and she’s out and about …

Then, there’s the Backgrounder. From any app just hold the home button for about 2 seconds and the app minimizes into the background. That way, if you want to start it up again, no waiting for the splash screen and load. It’s right there for a quick load. It’s good if you are working on something and need to switch between apps a lot. But since it does not persist after you turn your iPhone off and back on again, I don’t use it too much.

The Big Warranty Question

A lot of people are afraid of voiding their warranty on the iPhone. But if you just restore the phone from iTunes, it wipes out the programs. That’s right, a restore makes the iPhone new again, no sign of jailbreak. So the warranty is really a non-issue in my opinion. But make your own decision on that one …

Syncing With iTunes After A Jailbreak

After a jailbreak, I was curious to see how a sync would work: just like it does before the jailbreak.

I had some apps purchase on my iTunes, and some purchased on the phone. And everything synced fine.

I think some older versions of jailbreak programs used to mess around with your ability to sync, but not Blackra1n.

That’s just about it for me. If you have any questions or comments I’d love to hear it!

Here I’ve compiled a bunch of humorous, creative, or beautiful coffee graphics. I hope you enjoy them!

Whenever I hear about something late and breaking I still sometimes try googling it. Oops …

Better start with twitter. Maybe google will have a few stories tomorrow. But for now, Twitter has the latest news.

I even admit that I’ve followed games by using Twitter searches. Someone is always tweeting the score. So I know how the celtics are doing …

A lot of my friends and colleagues are holding out saying Twitter is a passing fad. Ok, you go ahead and wait.

I’m going to see what’s going on right now.

Last week I wanted to create a new theme for my Twitter feed, that would be really cool. Since it’s getting close to Christmas, and there is snow and cold, I thought a nice winterland theme would be nice, and appropriate.

So how I started was to begin with a new file, and I chose 1500px wide to make sure I would go across most major monitors. Only the hugest screens will have my image starting over to the right. Next, I laid out the spacing for the two bars at the right and left of the twitter stream. This is a judgement call. I chose to space them as if it was going to be on a 1280×1024 screen size. This is the majority of windows, so it will still miss in 800×600 and 1440×900 and other resolutions. Oh well, since Twitter does not allow anything dynamic or flexible, it will have to do.

Next step, deciding on color scheme and starting to create the elements. Since it’s a wonderland scheme, blues and greens work well. So I picked a few nice colors. For the trees, I went with a few different colors of green with a little brownish tint to make it look more real.

To create the trees, I made 3 triangles on top of each other for each pine tree. For the trees that were closer to the front, I also did a ‘combine paths’ and chose ‘union’ with an oval at the bottom of the triangles, to make it look rounded. I used the ‘chiffon’ texture at 50% which looked a lot like pine branches, and I did a gradient with a darker band in the middle, to give the tree some perspective.

The closer trees, I did a ‘Commands’, ‘creative’ and ‘add shadow’ with a blue color, and then I overlaid a gradient that faded from bluish to transparent over the trees in the back, to make them look more distant.

I also made an oval with a feathered edge, to look like a hill in front, on which the closer trees are standing.

Once I saved the completed image, I used PNG Gauntlet to compress it so that Twitter would allow me to use it for my background, and I loaded it.

It took me a few hours to complete it, and I think it turned out pretty well, do you agree?

After a couple weeks of talking to my twitter peeps I finally just decided to take the plunge and get an iPhone. And actually I’ve given it thought off and on for about a year. There are a couple people I know who own them and I was curious why they went into a trance every time I asked about it. “Ooooh you have to get one!” “If you do you’ll never go back!”

Back from where??

Maybe the rants and raves of apple fans made me move more slowly towards becoming an owner of an Apple product. More slowly because I had a secret fear that maybe they were just high. Now I know that I was right and wrong … at the same time.

Here’s why …

I went online to the At&t store and made the purchase, deciding to go with the 8GB since my music collection is pretty minimal and I don’t imagine I’ll have a huge stock of videos that I can’t leave home without. And 8GB because–hey– I’m not that huge of an Apple fan yet and maybe I should just put my toe in the water first. I mean 16GB? What’s that going to hold, like a million songs or something analogous to that? No, I’ll go with the 8GB please. And then maybe I will upgrade later … IF this whole thing works out of course.

And did it ever …

My phone finally arrived after 3 days shipping that left me checking the order status online over and over. Curiosity was strong and the general urge to test out the new gadget. It could have been a coffee grinder for all I cared, it was a gadget to be used and explored and tested. How good can an iPhone be?

Good. Very good. No, amazingly good!

After a brief time charging, the phone was ready to turn on and get rolling. So I hooked up to iTunes as instructed and got the phone activated.

Wow … just wow!

Two words for you: user experience.

The user experience of an iPhone is over the top amazing. It’s fun to scroll from app to app, and there is no sinking “i just can’t do what I want to do with this”. In fact, I’m continually incredulous at the things I CAN do.

Stuff like being able to be logged into all my gmail accounts at once. You have just one? Well good for you but I have at least 5 that I log into just about every day and what a pain to log in and log out in order to log in to the next account. I can just download them into a mail application you say? Yeah and lump them all together in one inbox, which I don’t want. But no, the iPhone allows me to check all of them and they are separate for me so I know what each one is about. Love that!

Then there’s the problem of having two Twitter accounts.

OK so your life isn’t interesting enough to share your daily thoughts with others? Fine, but let the rest of us meet on Twitter and converse …

It was not hard to find a Twitter app that lets me stay logged into both and switch back and forth.

Can’t do that on my laptop …

Plus, I hate logging into Facebook. Don’t really know why it just seems to be too long and complicated. But my iPhone allows me to quickly check and respond to messages and chat just like my laptop, without the hassle.

That’s 3 things I love …

And how about the whole “superfast internet anywhere anytime” thing? That’s sort of taken for granted but it adds a lot to the experience.

But there is a certain overall feel to the iPhone as well as the way you scroll and move from place to place. It’s just acts like it should, almost like it knows what I want. OK I do have to use my fingers but it reacts exactly like it should.

That’s what adds the wow factor. The entire experience is what it should be.

Next … Macbook Pro?? Overpriced?

Now I’m not so sure.

Well, knowing that I had over 5,000 tech saavy Twitter followers, I decided to let them know about the Nano. That was about 9:30 in the morning.

I just said:

my friend selling iPod nano 8gb ‘barely used’ $80 email etalledo@q.com if interested – please RT!

I had no idea whether it would work but I thought it might.

I had a couple responses, one retweet and within about an hour my friend sent me an IM saying he had a buyer! It was someone who lived closeby in Denver and was ready to buy one for his child.

My question is, how else could I have found someone who wanted a Nano if not for Twitter? How else could I have penetrated into all the office buildings where people were busily working, if not on Twitter. Since Twitter is easy to use from your cellphone, I didn’t need to go door to door or make any phone calls. Just sent a harmless tweet and made a match of buyer to seller.

Pretty picture of the Nano since this blog is really supposed to concentrate on design:

So there you have it. Twitter. It’s everywhere you want to be!

But what about Twitter?

On Twitter, you just click ‘join the conversation’, sign up and start tweeting. Anyone can do it, whether young or old, rich or poor famous or obscure. We can all just start tweeting.

We don’t have to know how to edit video, or upload our galleries, or write essays, or do more than two things in a row (max). All we have to do is tweet. And we know that that is.

How many plugins are there? Poke? Gifts? Events? None of that. Just tweets, and  we can follow people, and they can follow us. This does create natural groups of sorts, I have my own group, currently about 2700 people that I follow, and follow me. If I decide I don’t like someone, I can unfollow them. Simple and easy. If I want to add friends I add them. Quick, and start hearing what they have to say.

One thing at a time, and nothing I don’t need.