These days, anyone can make a tool and get it hosted for cheap, providing tremendous value to everyone who uses it. Here are a few that I use that you may not know about.
1. tinywow.com
tinywow.com is the holy grail of file conversion sites. It has hundreds of “x to y” conversions available, and you can use them with no limits, for free, and they delete your files after an hour. I mostly use it for converting WEBP and HEIC images, but anytime I’ve had any other file type issues, they’ve had the right tool for me.
2. capitalizemytitle.com
The rules for capitalizing titles are annoying. This site takes mere seconds to use. All you have to do is copy your title, go to capitalizemytitle.com, paste your title in, and it’ll automatically capitalize it for you. I always run my Medium article titles through this to be sure (turns out I needed to capitalize “of” in the title of this article!).
3. photopea.com
Photopea is an online photo editor made to be similar to Photoshop. It works with Photoshop .PSD files, and does its best to mimic all the features of Photoshop. This is contrast with other alternatives like GIMP, Paint, etc. that all have their own different shortcuts. Since it’s a website, there’s no installation, and somehow they’ve made saving to your file system really easy. When I’m on a computer without Photoshop, or I just want to make a quick edit, Photopea is perfect.
Another tool on my radar is dingboard.com. It’s still in early development, but it’s looking like a promising tool for quick, free photo editing.
4. The Wayback Machine
This is one of those tools that a lot of people probably know about, but those who don’t are severely missing out. The Wayback Machine lets you see snapshots of websites across time. This has two main use cases that are extremely useful:
- Being able to see a site that no longer exists
- Bypassing the paywall of an article
An example of #2: I wanted to read this New York Times article about the OpenAI vs NYT lawsuit, but it’s behind a paywall. Not an issue, because I can just search for its link on the Wayback Machine:
Of course, to get the most up-to-date news, you’ll need to pay, but for most people, the Wayback Machine is a lifesaver. The Wayback Machine is also an important tool for journalists, because it lets the people track when companies make changes on their sites, e.g. when Mistral removed “Committing to open models” from their website after making a partnership with Microsoft.
5. stemformulas.com
Lastly, a site I made!
Stemformulas is just a simple search for formulas that you forget often. For example, if I forget how to change the base of a logarithm, I can just quickly go to the site, type “log” into the search and have the answer within half a second. If I wanted to figure this out through Google, it would probably take a few clicks, and more time.
The site isn’t exhaustive — it doesn’t have all the formulas, but I take suggestions all the time from the site’s suggestion form. Let me know if you think anything should be added! You can also submit a pull request on the GitHub, so anything you want to have quick access to will be available.
That’s all! If you have any low-time-but-high-value free tools to suggest, leave a comment. Thanks for reading.
