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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.
The Model Cannot Spell, and That Is the Useful Limit
Asked for a sign reading OPEN TODAY, it produced correctly lit, correctly weathered letters spelling AXORRVO TOONVVN. What a small image model does well, what it cannot do, and the ten seconds it costs.
Where the Line Breaks Decide What You Get
A PDF holds glyphs at coordinates, not lines, so extraction is reassembly by threshold. The three numbers that decide your output, and the hyphen rule that was putting a space inside a surname.
Nine Hundred Voices in a Seventy-Eight Megabyte File
Measured: 113 characters became six seconds of audio in under four, three voices came out at 103, 184 and 242 Hz, and the speed control covers less ground than its numbers suggest.
What Survives a Translation Depends on the Script
Ten runs of one passage. Spanish came back whole three times out of three; Japanese dropped the second paragraph three times out of three and dated it to the fourteenth month. What to check when you cannot read the output.
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.