Notes
How the tools are built and checked, and the occasional piece on the numbers behind them.
A Gantt chart without dependencies is a picture Bars on a timeline communicate a plan. Arrows between them are what makes it recalculate when something slips, and that is the difference between a diagram and a planning tool. A generated privacy policy is a draft A policy describing practices you do not follow is worse than having none; it is a false statement about your data handling, in writing, on your own site. A signature image is not a digital signature One is a picture of your name. The other binds a document to a certificate and detects any later change. Most forms want the first and some contracts require the second. A word cloud shows frequency and nothing else It cannot tell you whether a word appeared in praise or complaint. Two decisions. A stop list and a square-root scale — are what separate a readable one from a decorative blob. ASCII art only lines up in monospace Paste a banner into an email and it collapses. The technique assumes every character is the same width, which is true in a terminal and false almost everywhere else. Base64 images cost you caching Embedding an image saves one request and adds a third to its size. Under HTTP/2 that trade is worse than it used to be, and the cache loss is the part people forget. Business cards come in two sizes Europe uses 85 by 55 millimetres, the US uses three and a half by two inches, and a card in one does not fit a holder made for the other. DPI is not resolution Setting an image to 300 DPI adds no detail. It changes a note about how large to print the pixels you already have. Email HTML is stuck in 1999 Outlook renders mail with Word. That single fact explains why email signatures are built from nested tables and inline styles, and why every modern layout technique fails. Local storage is not a backup A browser notepad keeps your text without an account, which is the point. It also loses it to a cleared cache, a private window, or seven days of not visiting on iOS. Nobody needs an ICO file any more Every browser still in use takes a PNG or an SVG. The sizes that matter are fewer than most generators produce, and the hard part is designing for sixteen pixels. Online tests that cannot tell you much An Ishihara plate on an uncalibrated screen tests the monitor. A mental age quiz tests which answers you picked. Both are worth doing if you know what they are.
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