Super Boring Tools

Search tools

Find a tool by name or what it does.

Guides

The tools do the work. These explain the decisions behind it: which format to reach for, what compression actually throws away, and when any of it is worth thinking about.

Text

1

How to clean up messy pasted text, in the right order

Text pasted from a PDF, an email or a spreadsheet arrives broken in five different ways at once. Fix them in the wrong sequence and you quietly destroy data.

6 min read

Image

3

Which image format should you actually use?

JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, SVG. Five formats, endless arguing, and a decision that usually takes ten seconds once you know what the question really is.

5 min read

What size should your images actually be?

The 6000-pixel camera original sitting in a slot that displays at 800 pixels is the most common mistake on the web, and the fix takes about fifteen seconds.

6 min read

How much can you compress an image before it shows?

Further than you think, but usually in the wrong direction. Most oversized images are oversized in pixels, not in quality, and the fix is rarely a lower quality slider.

6 min read

PDF

2

Reordering, merging and splitting PDF pages

Four operations cover almost every document problem you will ever have. Knowing which one you actually need takes about a minute, and none of it is worth a monthly subscription.

6 min read

Why is your PDF 40MB when it looks like plain text?

A twelve-page letter should weigh about as much as an email. When it weighs forty megabytes, the pages are almost certainly photographs rather than words.

5 min read

Converters

2

Why your CSV opens wrong, and how to stop it

A file of plain text separated by commas should be the simplest thing in computing. Instead it eats your leading zeros, turns product codes into dates, and opens as one column for half your colleagues.

6 min read

JSON, YAML and TOML: which one should your config be?

One is for machines talking to machines, one is for humans editing files by hand, and one is the quiet compromise in the middle. Pick wrong and you inherit a very specific set of bugs.

6 min read

Time

1

Timestamps and time zones: the mistakes that cost you a day

A Unix timestamp has no time zone, an offset is not a time zone, and one missing factor of a thousand will put your date in 1970. Here is the small set of rules that survives contact with reality.

6 min read

Unicode

1

The characters you cannot see, and the bugs they cause

Two strings look identical on screen and the computer insists they are different. Almost always, something is hiding between the letters.

6 min read

Developer

2

What actually makes a password strong

Not symbols. Not a capital letter at the front and a number at the end. Strength is randomness measured in bits, and length buys far more of it than punctuation ever will.

6 min read

What a hash actually proves

A checksum is a fingerprint, not a lockbox. Three assumptions people make about hashing are wrong, and one of them can genuinely get you hurt.

7 min read

Design

1

Why your light grey text fails

Contrast is a number between 1:1 and 21:1, and the thresholds that matter are fixed and public. Most failures are the same three or four mistakes, made confidently.

6 min read