Guides
Field notes from the workshop
Long-form answers to the questions behind the tools. Written by hand, sourced, and published only where this workshop has real standing: we explain mechanisms we have built ourselves.
What your photos quietly carry
EXIF, GPS and the metadata that travels with an image: what your phone records, which apps strip it, and how to remove it without recompressing your photo.
The characters you can't see
Zero-width marks, exotic spaces and Unicode watermarks: why text breaks, what hidden characters can reveal, and how to clean them without wrecking your emoji.
What a strong password actually measures
Entropy in plain terms, honest crack-time numbers, and why unique beats clever: what really protects accounts in 2026 and what only feels like it does.
Unix time, the working model
Timestamps, zones and the bugs between them: seconds vs milliseconds, the 2038 problem for real, and the one rule that prevents most datetime bugs.
Tools that never phone home
Why the best small web tools run entirely in your browser, what that can honestly cover, and how to verify any tool's privacy claim in about a minute.
How these are made
A guide ships here only when three things hold: the question is one people genuinely ask, this workshop has built something that gives it real standing to answer, and the finished page would deserve its place even if no search engine ever saw it. Every factual claim is checked against a spec, a primary source or our own shipped code before publishing, sources are listed at the end of each guide, and the dates on the page are real. There is no publishing schedule; when there is nothing worth saying, nothing gets said.