Practical guides, how-tos and comparisons to get the most out of our free online tools.
Numbering starts at 1 and cannot be set to 0, the alignment is spaces rather than zeros, and the remover undoes eight of the eleven separators without touching the indentation. What it still cannot do is tell your numbers from its own.
Daniel Okonkwo · 15 min read
Three encodings, one visible difference: %20 or +. The builder's form mode matches URLSearchParams byte for byte on seventeen values — but give it a base URL with a fragment and every parameter lands inside the hash, where no server sees it.
Daniel Okonkwo · 12 min read
A PDF stores glyphs at coordinates — not lines, not paragraphs, not a reading order. Extraction rebuilds the text from those positions, which is why two columns come out interleaved, a table loses its cells, and a scan gives you nothing at all. Measured by running the tool.
Daniel Okonkwo · 15 min read
Count pieces first, then linear feet, then board feet. A 2×4 measures 1½ × 3½ inches but is billed on the full 2 × 4 — 34 % of what you pay for is sawdust. Worked from the calculator's real output, with the waste rule it actually applies.
Marco Bianchi · 13 min read
Scaling until the loudest sample hits a ceiling barely changes how loud something sounds. Measuring in LUFS does. This tool measures — in two passes, correctly — and then prints a result it never verified, which on ordinary material can be well over a decibel adrift.
Daniel Okonkwo · 14 min read
One ffmpeg command, no encoder, and a result whose video stream is byte-for-byte the one you started with — verified by checksum. Plus why the file barely shrinks, and the difference between a silent track and no track at all.
Daniel Okonkwo · 11 min read
Four real stylesheets run through the minifier, measured raw and after gzip. Stripping every space saved 48, 103, 104 and 147 compressed bytes; stripping comments saved 57, 1 358, 2 420 and 1 042. Plus the five inputs this minifier breaks.
Daniel Okonkwo · 14 min read
One emoji is 1 character, or 7, or 11, or 25, depending on who is counting. Which one your form, your database and your SMS gateway mean — and a one-paste test that tells you which you are facing.
Daniel Okonkwo · 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.
Daniel Okonkwo · 13 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.
Daniel Okonkwo · 14 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.
Daniel Okonkwo · 11 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.
Daniel Okonkwo · 12 min read