Remember the time-lapse movie that helped you visualize the movement of tech stories on Techmeme? It did attract lot of eye-balls and as promised, here’s the secret recipe on how to make such a time lapse video with (almost) free software.

The process is simple and has two main parts - 1) Capturing screenshots and 2) Stitching all these images together so they appear as an animated movie or a flipbook.

Techmeme saves a snapshot of its homepage every 5 minutes and each snapshot has a unique URL with the timestamp. For instance, the snapshot of Techmeme at 1:50 PM ET, January 15, 2008 is available at www.techmeme.com/080115/h1350.

To capture those hundreds of screenshots, I created a simple macro (snippet below) using AutoHotKey that would automatically generate URLs, type them in the web browser, press the print screen key and then save the screenshot as an image - this ran in a loop 600 times capturing 50 hours of changes.

techmeme=http://www.techmeme.com/08010
url=%techmeme%%Date%/h%Hours%%Minutes% <- Create URL
Send, {CTRLDOWN}l{CTRLUP} <- Reach the Browser Address Bar
Send, %url% {ENTER} <- Paste the URL and Hit Enter
Sleep, 5000 <- Wait 5 seconds for the web page to load
Send, {PRINTSCREEN} <- Capture a screenshot

You may be wondering how the Print Screen key will save the screenshot to an image file when all it does is capture the current screen content to the clipboard ? That’s possible through SnagIt (available for a 30-day trial at techsmith.com) - You just mark the region that you wish to capture and SnagIt will do everything else.

Once you have all the screenshots, import all of them as a sequence inside Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere Pro, Camtasia, QuickTime Pro or any other video editor - just bring down the image transition time to 0.1 second (or less) and export the animation as a GIF or any video format. The results are always pretty amazing.

You can extend the trick to make time lapse movies of Google Maps, your road trips, construction sites, etc.

(Originally written by Amit at Labnol)

Have you ever come across a situation where you don’t have access to the Internet but can send or receive email messages? With email and no Internet, how do you read websites and blogs or check the current stock prices, or find what’s the top story on CNN homepage.Well, you can do a lot of interesting things over email without a web connection - you can read any webpages over email, maintain your task list, convert documents, upload photo and videos, get dictionary meanings of words and more.

Just make sure that you have added the following address to your email address book:

10. pdf@koolwire.com - You have an Office document or a picture on your computer or mobile phone that you wish to convert into a PDF file. Just email that file an email attachment to the above address and it will soon return to your Inbox as a PDF file. [koolwire review]

[...]

4. pdf2txt@adobe.com - Send a PDF document to this email address as an attachment and it will come back as a plain text file. Handy when your don’t have a PDF viewer to open the PDF document. Alternatively, you can send the PDF file to pdf2html@adobe.com for conversion to HTML format. [Extract Text from PDF]

3. ..@prod.writely.com - Google Docs provides a unique email address here - you can upload your documents, spreadsheets and presentations to Google Docs through this address and read them on your mobile phone using the just launched Google Docs mobile at docs.google.com/m. [Google Docs Upload]

[...]

And now the most useful email address that will help you read webpages through email without requiring a web connection:

0. www@web2mail.com - Send an email with the URL of the web page in the Subject field (e.g. www.cnn.com) and you’ll soon find a copy of that web page in your Inbox. A perfect option when there’s no Internet access in the area or access is restricted (for instance, you want to read the BBC homepage in China).

Another similar service is www4mail@wm.ictp.trieste.it - it will also fetch websites for you through email though in this case, the site address should go in the body of the email message.

(For full article visit, http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/access-websites-over-email-without-internet-connection/1660/)