Practical guides, how-tos and comparisons to get the most out of our free online tools.
Venus never gets more than 47.2° from the Sun, so it is always within two signs of your Sun sign. Over 10,248 dates from 1966 to 2026 it lands in the same sign as the Sun barely a quarter of the time.
Antonio Delgado · 4 min read
A pattern asks for length and a shop sells weight. 400 yards of DK is 182 g and two balls; 400 yards of fingering is 100 g and one. The bridge is a single number on the label, and reading it wrong is the reason projects run out.
Antonio Delgado · 5 min read
The American numbers count up as the needle gets fatter and the British ones count down. They cross exactly once, at 4.5 mm, where both read 7 — and that single coincidence is the trap.
Antonio Delgado · 5 min read
Two stitches per 10 cm is the difference between a 50 cm scarf and a 55 cm one. The pattern's cast-on number is only correct for the person who wrote it.
Antonio Delgado · 6 min read
The same 100 × 120 chart finishes 23 cm wide on 11-count and 11.5 cm wide on 22-count — twice the width, four times the area, from one number on the fabric label.
Antonio Delgado · 5 min read
Three nines sounds like a promise until you divide it into minutes. What 99.9 % buys per year, per month, per week and per day; why the measurement window matters far more than the extra nine; and the two different months this tool uses for the same slug.
Daniel Okonkwo · 10 min read
Points over total is trivial. What is not: averaging percentages instead of weighting them can shift a mark by twelve points, negative marking changes when guessing is worth it, and the same 62 % is a fail on one scale and an upper second on another. What the tool does, and the two things it cannot do.
Lena Hoffmann · 13 min read
Nine absences give five different rates depending on what you divide by — scheduled days, sessions, weekdays, calendar days, or a part-timer's own diary. What the tool computes, the three places it misleads, and why the Bradford Factor makes short repeated absences look ten times worse than one long one.
Camille Laurent · 11 min read
Twenty-five and five come from Francesco Cirillo's method, not from a trial. What the research actually measured is task switching and the cost of getting back in — and the reason a fixed interval helps is not that 25 minutes is optimal. Plus what the planner really returns, including the long break it quietly leaves out.
Lena Hoffmann · 12 min read
End minus start minus break is the easy part. Whether a break is paid and whether it counts as working time are two different questions with different answers by country — plus rounding, where timesheets actually go wrong, and what the tool does with a shift that crosses midnight.
Camille Laurent · 13 min read
Measured on the resizer itself: Fill is a centre crop with no focal point, and a portrait photo loses 38.9 percent off the top for an X-sized banner. Plus the current published dimensions, each with the date it was checked.
Daniel Okonkwo · 14 min read
A calculator gives you an order of magnitude, and anything holding up a floor, a roof or people needs an engineer and a code check. Between those two facts there is a great deal worth knowing: which power of the span the deflection really follows, which loading case the tool assumes, and what L/360 is in fractions of an inch on a span you can measure.
Marco Bianchi · 13 min read