40 posts tagged “tools”
Small tools I have built, many of which are hosted on my tools.simonwillison.net GitHub Pages site backed by my simonw/tools repository.
2023
image-to-jpeg (via) I built a little JavaScript app that accepts an image, then displays that image as a JPEG with a slider to control the quality setting, plus a copy and paste textarea to copy out that image with a data-uri. I didn't actually write a single line of code for this: I got ChatGPT/GPT-4 to generate the entire thing with some prompts.
Here's the full transcript.
2019
free-for.dev (via) It’s pretty amazing how much you can build on free tiers these days—perfect for experimenting with side-projects. free-for.dev collects free SaaS tools for developers via pull request, and has had contributions from over 500 people.
2009
Unicode code converter (via) Fantastically useful tool to convert strings of characters in to every unicode and/or escaping syntax you can possibly imagine.
Toy Chest: Online or Downloadable Tools for Building Projects (via) “Toy Chest collects online or downloadable software tools/thinking toys that humanities students and others without programming skills (but with basic computer and Internet literacy) can use to create interesting projects”—a fantastic list compiled by the English Department at UCSB.
Hack Day tools for non-developers
We’re about to run our second internal hack day at the Guardian. The first was an enormous amount of fun and the second one looks set to be even more productive.
[... 920 words]Nmap 5.00 Release Notes. Released today, “the most important Nmap release since 1997”. New features include Ncat, a powerful netcat alternative, Ndiff, a utility for comparing scan results so you can spot changes to your network, and a new Nmap Scripting Engine using Lua.
Tools of the Modern Python Hacker: Virtualenv, Fabric and Pip. Ashamed to say I’m not using any of these yet—for Django projects, my manage.py inserts an “ext” directory at the beginning of the Python path which contains my dependencies for that project.
aws—simple access to Amazon EC2 and S3. The best command line client I’ve found for EC2 and S3. “aws put --progress my-bucket-name/large-file.tar.gz large-file.tar.gz” is particularly useful for uploading large files to S3. Written in Perl (with no dependencies), shelling out to curl to do the heavy lifting.
2008
lightningtimer.net. I'm fed up of having to dig out or knock up a timer script every time I manage lightning talks, so I've given one a domain name. You can use lightningtimer.net/#90 to set a different start time for the counter.
Update March 25th 2025: I rescued an old copy of this from the Internet Archive and re-published it to tools.simonwillison.net/lightning-timer.
2007
The CSS Redundancy Checker. A tool for checking your markup for outdated CSS rules that don’t match any of your HTML. We were discussing the need for something similar to this at Torchbox a few weeks ago.