Computer Tricks and Secrets

Animated GIF images may remind you of those cluttered and distracting homepages of the Geocities era but take a peek at these cinemagraphs and it might forever change the way you think of GIFs. These are animated GIFs created using frames of classic movie scenes that play in an endless loop. How to Create GIF Animations? There are free tools available that let you easily convert video clips into animated GIFs that you can later host on sites like Flickr or Tumblr – not all image hosting sites support animated GIFs but the one mentioned here do. This is a two-step process – first convert the video into a sequence of image frames and then assemble these frames into a looping GIF animation with some custom delay. Step 1: Download FFmpeg and extract the ffmpeg.exe file to, say, the c:\ffmpeg\ folder. The .7z files can be unzipped using the 7-zip utility. Step 2: Now we’ll extract the frames from our video file. The command* is simple. c:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe -i movie.avi img-%03d.gif If your...

There are two types of PDF documents – those created by sending Office files, images, etc. to an Acrobat like PDF printer and those created by scanning physical paper like pages of a book, legal documents, etc. Google could always index PDF documents created by conversion but now they also recognize text from PDFs that are generated by scanning paper documents using OCR software. This is a scanned document and this is the html text view of that same document converted by Google. Since scanned PDFs are nothing but images, don’t be surprised if Google adds a "search by text" function to their Image Search engine similar to OneNote or EverNote. That will surely be huge. Convert Scanned PDFs to Text Now if you have bunch of scanned PDF files on your hard drive and no OCR software, here’s what you can do to convert them into recognizable text. Create a folder in your website (say abc.com/pdf) and upload all the PDF images to that folder. Now create a public web page that links ...