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Free Tools for Remote Developers: My Actual Browser-Tab Toolkit
The free browser tools I keep open as a remote developer: JSON, Base64, regex, timestamps, image compression, and the honest gaps. No installs.
A Summary Can Keep Every Number and Still Be Wrong
Measured on a source written for the purpose: nine figures carried over, none invented, and two of them reattached to the wrong thing. Why checking the numbers gives false confidence.
A Reworded Quotation Is a Misquotation
One passage, three tones, measured: paragraph count and length held every time, 44 to 55% of the words changed, and the quoted sentence was reworded in all three. What a paraphraser keeps and what it quietly drops.
Twenty Names in a Minute Is the Easy Part
Two measured runs: twenty names each, one explaining every name and the other none, and a suggestion for an accounting practice that belongs to a FTSE 100 accounting company. What to check before you choose.
The Seam Is Where a Split Picture Goes Wrong
A 1001 pixel width cut into three is 333, 334, 333, and which tile gets the extra pixel decides whether the picture goes back together. Verified by hashing a split and its reassembly.
Joining Two Clips Is a Re-Encode, Not a Paste
Copying two mismatched clips end to end reported 11.996 seconds for 11 seconds of footage and declared the wrong resolution. Why the cheap join breaks, and what the honest one costs.
A Word File Is Not a Page Until Something Lays It Out
A .docx holds paragraphs and styles, not a page, so every converter typesets it afresh and no two agree on the page count. What survives, what does not, and why a tracked deletion can reach the PDF.
What Comes Back From a PDF Is Text, Not Layout
A PDF stores glyphs at coordinates, not paragraphs, so a converter has to infer the rest. What that costs, measured on a real conversion: columns read across the gutter, a table flattened into one line, and a scanned page that yields nothing.
Skew Breaks OCR Long Before Resolution Does
Measured against the engine this site runs: three degrees of tilt costs nothing and five costs 2.9% of your characters, while grey-on-grey text, a heavy blur and a quality-25 JPEG all read perfectly. The checklist most OCR advice gives you is the wrong one.
Two Photos Side by Side Is a Scaling Problem
Your images are never the same size, so merging them is a scaling decision first. What side by side, stacking and a grid each do to a phone screenshot beside a phone photo, measured in pixels kept and pixels invented.