A bay of free tools.

Guides

The parts that do not fit on a tool page — how to check whether a site is uploading your files, what really comes out of a Malaysian salary, and why some PDFs refuse to shrink.

• How to tell whether an online tool is uploading your files

  A free converter says it is private. Here is how to verify that yourself in about thirty seconds, using the browser you already have, on any site.

• Malaysian take-home pay, end to end

  What comes out of a Malaysian salary: the four statutory deductions, the order they apply in, and why EPF and SOCSO step in bands rather than percentages.

• Why two salary calculators disagree

  Same salary, same country, two different take-home figures. The six assumptions that cause it, and how to tell which calculator is wrong.

• Which image format to actually use

  JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC, GIF and SVG compared by what they are for — with the transparency, compression and compatibility trade-offs that decide it.

• How PDF compression works

  What actually takes up space in a PDF, which parts can be reduced, and why a text document that is already small stays that way no matter what you do.

• Why PDF to Word is never perfect

  A PDF holds no paragraphs, tables or reading order. What converters must infer, why some files convert cleanly, and when to run OCR first.

• Static vs dynamic QR codes

  Dynamic QR codes let you change the destination and see scan counts. They also stop working if you stop paying. When each one is the right choice.

• Payment QR codes across Asia

  How the major Asian payment QR schemes work, what is actually encoded in them, and why you cannot generate a valid merchant payment code with a generic QR tool.

Articles

Shorter, more practical write-ups on the problems people arrive here with.

• How to get a photo under a 200 KB upload limit

  Upload forms reject photos for size, dimensions or both — and the fix is different for each. How to hit an exact file size without wrecking the image.

• What to do when an email attachment is too large to send

  Why the 25 MB limit is really about 18 MB, which files actually shrink, and the order to try things in before falling back to a link.

• Getting a passport or visa photo to the exact size a form wants

  Millimetres, pixels and DPI are three ways of saying the same thing. How to convert between them and hit an exact spec without distorting the photo.

All 136 tools

Every tool, linked directly. All of them are free, none require an account, and apart from a handful of PDF conversions that need a rendering engine browsers do not have, none of them upload your files anywhere.