Guides
How video stills actually work, and how to get the one you need without wasting quality.
YouTube thumbnail sizes and URLsEvery thumbnail resolution YouTube generates, the exact URL for each, which ones are always available, and why some carry black bars.How to screenshot a YouTube videoMethods for Windows, macOS, iPhone, Android and the browser. Includes the trick for capturing without the player controls in shot.How to extract frames from a videoBrowser tools, ffmpeg one-liners and VLC compared: quality, speed, batch support and when each one is the right choice.How to go frame by frame on YouTubeThe two keys that step one frame at a time, the three reasons they stop working, and what to do on a phone where they do not exist.How to check word count anywhereGoogle Docs, Word, Slides, Pages and the browser, with the shortcut for each. Why two tools disagree, and what a word count converts to in pages and minutes.How to fix a JSON syntax errorWhat the error message means in JavaScript, Python, PHP and Java, the eight mistakes behind nearly all of them, and how to find the character at fault.How to convert CSV to JSONThe browser, Python, jq, Node and Google Sheets compared, plus the four things about CSV that break a conversion: quoting, delimiters, encoding and Excel.How to convert HEIC to JPGWhy an iPhone photo arrives as HEIC, the fix on iPhone, Windows and Mac, and the one setting that stops it happening again.How to remove the background from an imageThe browser, Photoshop, Preview, PowerPoint and the phone method compared, plus why a white background is a different job from a subject cutout.Does resizing an image reduce quality?What a downscale actually throws away, why none of it comes back on the way up, and the measured cost across six methods on the same photograph.What JPEG quality setting should you use?What every step down the quality scale costs in bytes and in visible detail, swept from 100 to 40 on five kinds of picture, with the number where the saving stops being worth it.How to open a WebP fileWhich software already opens WebP and which never will, the fix on Windows, macOS, iPhone and Android, and the same answer for AVIF.How to convert JPG to PNGThe steps in Paint, Preview, Photoshop and the browser, plus the two things people expect the conversion to fix that it cannot.How to make flashcards that actually workPaper, Word, Google Docs, Quizlet, Anki and the browser compared, plus the four rules for writing a card you will still get right in a month.What lorem ipsum is, and what it saysWhere the Latin comes from, what Cicero actually wrote, why it survived 500 years of typesetting, and when placeholder text is the wrong choice.Do QR codes expire?A static code never expires and a dynamic one is a subscription. How to tell which you were given, why free codes stop working, and what to do when one already has.Is there AirDrop for Windows?Apple does not make one, and most of the pages saying otherwise are selling something. What actually moves a file from an iPhone to a PC, ranked by how little you have to install.Does trimming an MP3 lose quality?Cutting an MP3 usually re-encodes it, and that costs real detail. What frame-accurate cutting is, what it cannot do, and the loss measured over ten generations.How to make a gradient in CSSLinear, radial and conic syntax explained, why a two-colour blend goes grey in the middle, and how to put a gradient on text and on a border.