By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

While idly browsing online today (as one often does on a Sunday afternoon), I had a look at the options on the new Stumbleupon toolbar for Firefox 3 to see if anything new was there. I was intrigued to discover this:

It turns out that you can export ALL of your Stumbleupon “likes” from your Stumbleupon profile to your Firefox 3 Bookmarks.

The irritating part to this though is that if you have a lot of stumbled likes, it will take a long time for this process to be completed and your browser is basically frozen while it is going on. You can’t use Firefox for other surfing while this is happening and if you eventually want to shut Firefox down, you’ll have to terminate the whole thing. So if you have thousands of stumbles to transfer over, you might want to leave this running overnight while you’re sleeping.

When it’s finished, you’ll have a nice backup of all your stumbled sites in your Firefox bookmarks. You can then repeat the process every week or month depending on the volume of your stumbling activity.

I am pretty certain it doesn’t transfer over your tags as well, but nevertheless, having a simple record of the sites is better than nothing. But in future upgrades, having the tags transferred over would be a nice touch for better organisation purposes. I have over 12,000 stumbled sites and having them all tagged would make my life a lot easier when it comes to tracking down a particular site.

So taking this idea a step further, if you use the Del.icio.us extension which synchronises your Firefox bookmarks with your Del.icio.us account, then you could export your Stumbleupon “likes” to Firefox, then they will be synchronised to your Del.icio.us account. The only downside to that of course is that they won’t be tagged and organised, so it’s up to you if you want to go down that route. Personally I am still debating whether I want to throw 12,000 untagged URL’s into my Del.icio.us account.

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

I have always been a bit of a sucker for new toys and gadgets, especially ones on the internet and Twitterfone is now officially “my new toy”.  The invite code has been sitting in the wreckage that is called my email inbox for the past couple of weeks now and it was only today that I finally got around to activating it and seeing what Twitterfone was all about. As soon as I did so, I got that gleam in my eye and my girlfriend said to her friend who was around, “uh, oh, I know that look… I’ll never get Mark off the computer now!”

So what is Twitterfone all about?

Continue reading ›

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

A man, whose partner of 12 years walked out on him, plans to start a new life – but not in the traditional sense.  He plans to start a completely new life by auctioning his entire old life on eBay and walking away with nothing except his passport and his wallet.

The auction is due to start tomorrow and will run for one week.   The man in question, Ian Usher, has set up a website to publicize the upcoming auction and he insists that it is completely genuine and not a gimmick.   The website has YouTube videos showing his house in Perth, Western Australia, and it has details of everything the successful bidder will receive.

In his website intro, Ian says :

I have had enough of my life! I don’t want it any more! You can have it if you like!

However, I am still not sure whether this is inspired madness, complete foolishness, or just some sort of mid-life crisis.

He adds that, included in the auction, will be his house and all its contents, a car, a motorbike, a jetski, kitesurfing gear, his job (he works in a rug store), his clothes, and even his friends (how can he sell his friends?)

He hopes to make up to $500,000 to fund his new life.

I can’t make up my mind whether Ian is very brave or totally nuts.    What do you think?   Could you turn your back on your life with only your wallet and passport in your pocket and sell everything else you own to someone?   It might actually be very liberating to do it.

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Mozilla has a nifty looking downloads map which breaks down all the Firefox 3 downloads country by country.  Download Squad previously commented that Turkmenistan was letting the side down with seven downloads but they must have seen the article and got all embarrassed because they suddenly picked up speed and they are now up to a staggering 30 downloads! You go Turkmenistan!

I started moving the mouse around to see who else was not giving much love to Firefox and my mouse passed over North Korean airspace.    It was then that I discovered that with zero downloads, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il does not like to use the Fox.  He’s obviously more of an Internet Explorer man when it comes to doing his online international drug deals and eBay sales.

Of course you have to take a lot of things into account with this Mozilla download map.   The western world is obviously richer with more computers and better internet access than say Africa for example.    Other countries may have people who are very poor and cannot afford computers or internet, points which the Download Squad article also underlines.

But we’re coming up for nearly 15 MILLION downloads worldwide in the space of less than 4 days.    The Firefox 3 juggernaut shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon.