Front-end developer and tech writer · View profile
· 14 min read
A URL at the end of a sentence keeps the full stop; an email address at the end of the same sentence does not. An accented first name in an address comes back truncated. Every case here was run through the tools and the exact output is reported.
· 12 min read
Three commands hide behind three buttons: one frame at a timestamp, a fixed number spread across the clip, or one every N seconds. Here are the exact arguments, the 60-frame ceiling and the reason a frame from the middle of a compressed clip can never be as sharp as a keyframe.
· 11 min read
There are two completely different ways to turn a video, and only one of them touches the picture. This tool takes the slow, lossy, universal road — and there is a good chance your sideways phone clip does not need it at all.
· 13 min read
English title case has three different cutoffs depending on the style guide. French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian have none at all. German capitalises every noun. The tool knows about none of this — here is exactly what it does.
· 11 min read
This is grep for people who do not use grep, with one important difference: the match is a plain substring, so a real regular expression returns an empty box and no error. Every claim here was checked by running the tool.
· 11 min read
Two lines that look identical are often not identical. Case, a trailing space, a no-break space and two different encodings of the same accented letter were each run through the duplicate finder, and it reported no duplicates for three of the four.
· 12 min read
A paste carries characters you cannot see: no-break spaces, soft hyphens, zero-width spaces, tabs and CRLF. Four cleanup tools were run against each of them, and they use three different definitions of whitespace.
· 12 min read
The encryption is the easy half. Here is exactly what the browser tool does to your file — cipher, key derivation, salt, nonce — and why an encrypted attachment with the passphrase in the same thread protects nothing at all.
· 16 min read
Swapping names for identifiers does not take a database out of the GDPR — Article 4(5) and Recital 26 say so directly. Genuinely synthetic data is outside the Regulation altogether. That single distinction decides how you seed a staging environment.
· 15 min read
Cue 12 of the English track is not cue 12 of the French one, because translators split and join sentences differently. Two strategies exist for pairing them; this merger uses neither — it interleaves. Here is what that gives you and when it is good enough.
· 15 min read
Measure the offset at two points instead of guessing it once. If it is constant, one shift fixes the file. If it grows, it is a frame-rate mismatch — 25 fps against 23.976 drifts 2.5625 seconds every minute — and no shift will ever fix that.
· 13 min read
Removing the numbers and the timestamps is the easy half. The half that decides whether the transcript is readable is the italic tags, the dialogue dashes, the sound descriptions and the sentences broken across two cues — and this converter leaves every one of them for you.
· 12 min read
A comma is quoted, a quotation mark is doubled, and a two-line cue keeps both lines — verified byte-identical over three consecutive round trips. What can still change your file is the spreadsheet in the middle.
· 15 min read
Luhn is a checksum for catching typos, patented in 1960, and that is its entire job. A number that passes it tells you nothing about any account. For testing a payment integration you need your processor's published numbers, not a generated one.
· 18 min read
Whether a drawn signature is valid is settled elsewhere. What decides whether your document actually gets signed is the order you ask people in, what the audit trail records, and six failure modes that have nothing to do with the law.
· 13 min read
RFC 8259 requires exactly three things to be escaped inside a JSON string. Everything else is optional. The one that actually breaks pipelines is a lone surrogate — legal in JSON text, impossible in UTF-8, and silently replaced the moment your data is written out.
· 13 min read
The smallest thing that is still a table is two lines: a header row and a delimiter row. Here is why the second one is mandatory in GitHub Flavored Markdown, where pipe tables do not exist at all, and what a generator does that hand-typing cannot.
· 15 min read
A Markdown table has exactly two forbidden characters in a cell: the pipe and the line break. Here is what each one does, how a converter handles them, why the escape has to be applied in the right order, and why padding never matters.
· 15 min read
Why the reader's language decides the delimiter, what the converter does to the quoting when you switch, what the sep= first line really is, and the count of quoted cells on the same export written five ways.
· 13 min read
What happens to the header row, what happens to rows of unequal length, what happens to types — and the one thing transposing is regularly mistaken for and cannot do.
· 15 min read
Two documents that differ only in how many children exist produce two different JSON shapes, and no converter can tell them apart without a schema. Plus what this one really does with attributes, mixed content and whitespace — and the one thing it still cannot record.
· 15 min read
Quoted delimiters, embedded newlines, ambiguous types, duplicate headers and encoding. Each one was run through the converter and the exact output is printed here — including the two cases it does not rescue.
· 16 min read
The same two orders come out as five columns from one converter and ten from another, and neither is wrong. Dotted paths, arrays of scalars, arrays of objects and records with different keys — four decisions, made for you, usually silently.
· 14 min read
Removing tags and sanitising HTML are two different jobs. One real fragment run through a naive regex and through a formatting-aware stripper, with script and style contents, block breaks, comments, CDATA and entity order all shown as output.