Download webmail to files on your local computer

I've wanted to clear out my extremely full Excite.com e-mail account for a while, but as it's web-based e-mail, it has no way of batch downloading/saving messages, nor even batch forwarding. If you're a Gold subscriber, you can access your messages via POP3 e-mail, but I'm not.

However, I discovered a way that works for Excite, and should work for other webmail accounts such as Hotmail and so on. The Firefox web browser has an extension available for it called DownThemAll! that is a mass downloader. This can be used to hit links to e-mail messages in your inbox, and download the html page containing the message. One drawback is that you get the webmail code as well as the message itself, so your files are larger, but it sure beats clicking on and downloading each one of them individually.


Details:
Once this extension is installed and you have restarted Firefox, in your webmail inbox folder, right-click on an empty space, and select "DownThemAll!" The DTA interface will prompt you to make your selection. Scroll down until you start seeing links with Descriptions (in the Description column) matching your e-mail subjects. In Excite, all of my messages begin with the URL "http://e19.email.excite.com/msg_read.php?...", but I usually just match the Description to the subject of the first message.

Click the first matching description to highlight it, then scroll down to where descriptions matching your e-mails stop, hold down shift (don't release it until after you release the mouse button), and click the mouse once on the last description matching one of your messages. This will highlight all your messages. Next, right-click on the highlighted messages, and select the green "Check selected items" option. This will mark them all for downloading.

Pick what folder you want to save your files in - usually I store mine in a subfolder in Documents. For the renaming mask, enter in the following: *text*.htm <--This uses the name of the link for the filename (what you see in the Description column of DTA), which is usually the message subject, and gives them all a .htm extension, which will open with your web browser. I leave Inclusive filters and Additional filters alone.

Then click the Start! button, and it should start bulk downloading your e-mail messages into the folder of your choice. It may ask you what to do in the event of messages that have the same subject - I just tell it to automatically rename the file (e.g. add _001, _002, etc to the end of the filename for each additional download with the same subject) and use these settings for this session.


Tips:
This also works if you want to save a forum thread. For example in phpBB, after you're in the first page of the thread, look for DTA links described with numbers (page numbers of each page in the thread). Select those. Since the individual page links on phpBB don't have descriptive names, usually use a mask such as topic name - pg*text*.htm <--So I get files named "topic name - pg1.htm" (and ...pg2, etc).

Under the Advanced tab in DTA's preferences, I have my max chunks per download set to 1 (Disabled). To avoid placing excessive load on your e-mail service or forum (and also to avoid being banned), you may want to set yours this way.

In Firefox, you can find the DTA preferences under the Tools menu -> DownThemAll -> Preferences, or just click the underlined Preferences link at the very lower right-most corner of the DTA window when you're selecting links to download.

If you find yourself needing to rename a large group of files*, because you have redundant beginning filenames, I suggest using Peter's Flexible Renaming Kit (PFrank). It can do batch rename jobs under Windows operating systems, and it received a 4/5 rating on Tucows with 92% popularity. I've used it and I can see why. The preview feature is quite effective.

*-Of course, Linux and *NIX users that know how can do this right from their command line. Yet another reason to abandon Windows and go to Linux - the extreme limitedness of Windows' rename.exe command ;)

STOP 0x0000006F error during Windows XP setup

While helping a client install Windows XP Home Edition (Upgrade) over the phone, we encountered a stop 0x0000006F error during setup (even before it got to the interactive part) repeatedly. Trying it from Windows ME resulted in a CD read error. I had the customer take a look at the CD, and there was a thumbprint on the data side (with no printing). He cleaned the CD with a clean cotton cloth, reinserted the CD, and it worked. So if you're encountering this stop 0x0000006F error, it may be a small smudge or scratch on the disk. Try cleaning it.

If that doesn't work, you may need to obtain a CD drive lens cleaner (basically a CD with a small brush on the underside that cleans the CD-ROM drive laser lens) or try a new CD or DVD drive.

trueSpace message windows hidden behind the program?

I ran into this recently, with Caligari trueSpace 4.3 acting like it was always on top, no matter what, even on top of its own "Load scene" and "Load object" windows, or any error messages, to name a few (this would also make it appear to be frozen). It was annoying, because you couldn't load or save anything (unless one worked blind, using the esc and enter keys, for example). This is under Windows XP Pro. I did some searching and it turns out this occurs if the Windows XP Taskbar is set to Auto-Hide. If you disable auto-hide on the taskbar, trueSpace behaves correctly.

Polyphasic Sleeping, Days 8-12 (Tuesday through Saturday)

It's been a somewhat chaotic week for staying on the sleep schedule. I think what started it was taking extra back-to-back naps during the wee hours of the morning on Tuesday - I should space out naps from each other by at least 90 minutes. Twice now I've ended up sleeping through the night (including last night, between Friday and Saturday - I went to bed at 1:30AM [late for my nap] after eating a large meal and woke up at 8:30AM), while other days I've successfully slept only polyphasically. Either way I've felt fairly functional, and I've been napping during the daytime (8AM, 12PM, 4PM, 8PM, etc) regardless of how much or little I slept the night before.

I'm going to try sleeping on the couch or floor or something for the night portion of my cycle starting tonight. I think my bed is making it much to easy for me to fall asleep and stay asleep. I found another mode for my watch that causes it to beep once a minute in the five minutes until the alarm goes off, and then beep for 20 seconds; that might be more likely to wake me up. 20 seconds is kind of short; I've slept through it before even when I wasn't trying polyphasic sleeping. I need some sort of alarm that's much more insistent and has a tendency to repeat at five minute intervals unless some fairly sophisticated process is used to disable it (requiring a fairly awake and thinking brain).

The front living room has also been rigged up with curtains blocking it off from the bedrooms, and it has a full-spectrum 80W flourescent light, so I'm going to try spending the next few nights in there so I hopefully don't feel so sleepy from 2-6AM. I'm trying to eradicate the day/night rythm, and go entirely to a 6-7 times per 24 hour period sleep cycle, regardless of light/darkness - that's the theory, at least. We shall see how it goes!

Polyphasic Sleeping, Days 6-7 (Sun afternoon, Monday)

Day 6 (Sunday late morning to end of day)
Since I took that extra 30 minute nap on Saturday around noon, and then forced myself to take all my other naps for that day at the regular times, I haven't felt as tired, even when running past my regular nap time by as much as an hour. I think that it might have repaid some of the sleep deficit I incurred when I was first adjusting to this sleep schedule. In the afternoon I completed some more of the website project I'm working on (something new for TerranRobotics.com, though it won't be going live for a week or two yet), played with the cats, watched a video, et cetera, and felt fine. Also answered some more e-mail (or maybe that was this morning).

(I also tried to find a used 20-40GB Quantum Fireball Plus, Maxtor D740X/similar, or Seagate 7200.7 (a particularly reliable model, according to StorageReview's Reliability Database) hard drive on eBay for no more than $0.50/GB, but no luck - it seems that there's been a bit of an upswing in demand this past week, and the drives are all pretty consistently going for $0.75-$1.00+ per gigabyte. Oh well, demand has to trail off eventually. Yes, I couldn't resist talking a little bit about computer equipment :)

Day 7 (Monday)
I figured out how my brain is trying to trick me into going back to bed sometimes when my alarm gets me up. Somehow, when the alarm went off, I found myself fiddling with the alarm trying to turn it off and thinking that it was signalling that it was time to go to sleep. This happened around 4AM today, if I'm remembering correctly. Once the rational part of my brain chipped in and said "Wait a minute, how does an alarm indicate that it's time to go to bed?!" I didn't have much trouble waking up and getting up. Funny ;)


I gather that it's a very good idea to start off on polyphasic sleep with no sleep deficit. So the idea is to get a good night's sleep the night before, then start napping during the day after a good nights sleep to kick off the polyphasic sleep schedule. When I made the decision to try the polyphasic sleep schedule, it was late in the afternoon, and I hadn't been napping that day, so I had to wait until the following day to start it (although I was chomping at the bit to go). I'm glad I did wait until the following day and then start taking the naps after my full nights sleep - I think it made things easier. I can't imagine what it would have been like if I'd been any more tired while trying to adjust to it.

For the most part, adjusting to this sleep schedule wasn't as bad as I had expected*, but some times I had to be very mentally determined to make myself get out of bed. I think one of the things that kept me going was that I was determined to keep at it even if I slipped up and overslept a few times, or "fell off the wagon", so to speak, and I knew that if I went back to sleep now it would only prolong the agony of the adjustment period.
* - (Bear in mind, I'm completely abstaining from caffeine and stimulants, and during the most difficult part of the adjustment period I was staying away from sugar - something I think I'm going to resume doing anyway, since sugar tends to make me irritable regardless of what my sleep schedule is).

One of the nice things I've noticed about this sleep schedule is that since I'm taking breaks for a nap every four hours, my performance doesn't decline appreciably the longer I've been awake. Contrast to sleeping from 11PM-7AM, and then being up all day - as a monophasic sleeper, I tended to grow more tired after about 3PM. Furthermore, since I'm getting refreshed every four hours on the polyphasic sleep schedule, if I get into a foul/depressed mood during one of my waking periods, chances are I'll feel better after my next nap, and it won't have a chance to last the whole day.

Polyphasic Sleeping - Days 4-6 (Fri & Sat, Sun morning)

Day 4 (Friday)
Involved a bit of sitting and staring off into space trying not to think about how tired I was, but mostly I worked. I'd passed a pretty lousy night the night before, having eaten more than I should have during the wee hours of the morning (hey, I was hungry!) Not feeling quite as desperate for rest when I lay down to take a 30-minute nap as before, mainly because I'd accepted that I can fall asleep in the first ten or fifteen minutes.

Day 5 (Saturday, yesterday)
It feels a little weird calling it yesterday, because I can remember it - it feels like last evening was in this waking period, even though I've slept twice since then.

During the wee hours of Saturday morning, I spent most of the time learning about the Drupal CMS and installing it on my testing webserver. So, although I may feel tired at times, it mainly affects my motivation to work and makes me disinclined to try to make decisions (though I am very cautious by nature), but I can still absorb and put to use technical information (my brain is functional).

I was awfully tired on Friday, and had been planning on adding in an extra (seventh) nap sometime during the day on Saturday. However, instead of putting at least a 90 minute gap between the two naps, I ended up having my noon nap and then resetting my alarm for another 30 minutes right after it. I guess my tired brain can rationalize anything when it's just been woken up by an alarm. I felt groggy after that, but I livened up again after my 4PM nap.

Saturday evening, I was talking with some people about computers, and had difficulty breaking away (computers...too much fun...to resist talking about). After I passed my 8PM nap time, I started feeling progressively more tired, until I made myself head home, and ended up arriving home just a few minutes before 9PM. Then I felt compelled to wait for an eBay auction that was ending in the next 22 minutes. The eBay auction exceeded the price I had been willing to pay, so I turned in at about 9:15PM. When my alarm awakened me at 9:45PM, once I woke up I felt fine.

There has been some grogginess in the first 5-15 minutes following the naps, but it seems to be growing weaker, so the temptation to go back to bed is much easier to resist now. (Note: never, ever, lie back down.) Furthermore, it feels like I'm sleeping longer during the nap times, even though the actual amount of time hasn't changed. The first few times it happened I jerked awake when my alarm went off thinking "Oh no, I've overslept!" even though my alarm was plainly still beeping.

Day 6 (Sunday morning)
I wasn't particularly productive this night, but that would probably be mainly because I didn't start working on something that would keep me engaged. Getting started is the main thing.

I've noticed the past few nights, each night the deep point of my former sleep cycle has been growing less pronounced. The first couple of days, I could really feel it hit at 4AM - I wanted very much to stay in bed (I didn't, because I knew I would sleep through my next alarm if I did). Now, I just feel a little more tired when I wake up from my 4AM nap than my other naps, and it wasn't particularly distinguishable this morning. Pretty soon, I'm hoping that my day/night sleep cycle will be balanced out, so that I feel as awake at night as during the day.


I confess when I started writing this post I was having a hard time keeping track of how many days it's been since I started this experiment. Do I count from when I woke up from my last full night of sleep (Tuesday at 8AM), or do I count from when I would normally have gone to sleep but instead started doing the polyphasic thing? (Tuesday at 10PM) I'm going to stick to what seemed to be my original assumption, flawed as it may be, that Day 1 began when I woke up from my last full night of sleep (and so, of course, I would have felt entirely normal on day 1, having had eight hours of regular sleep the night before). If you think it should be the other way around, feel free to mentally subtract 1 day from all my day numbers (so my Day 1 would become Day 0). If I didn't think it would change my post URLs (OK, it doesn't), I might modify the titles myself.

Polyphasic Sleeping - Day 3

In my previous post, I talked about beginning an attempt to become a polyphasic sleeper. I'm now on day 3 (roughly 64 hours since my last full night of sleep), sleeping only three hours per planetary revolution, and I don't feel that bad. Perhaps a bit more brain-dead than day 2, but still quite functional.

Today, I swapped circuit boards between a couple of hard drives (this required going to Sears and picking up an appropriate T8 torx screwdriver) and got one hard drive functioning, tested a failed hard disk and recertified it, studied an Adobe Photoshop book, took a walk, disassembled and tested a laptop battery pack (risky - may explode if shorted), retouched and file-size optimized a bunch of images and then converted them into a PDF document, read through a new 54-page webcomic, and posted a new piece of art to my deviantART account, among other things.

I still have to update my website, but I think that will have to wait for "tomorrow" (next waking period, from 12:30AM-4:00AM). It's about 11:50PM at the moment, so I'll be going to sleep at 12AM, and up again at, you guessed it, 12:30AM. It's a good thing I have dual alarms on my watch - I've been using a 30 minute countdown timer, backed up by an alarm set to go off at a specific time about 2 minutes after the countdown timer, and several times I've only been raised by the second alarm going off.