OneTaskBlog
Practical explainers, each backed by a tool you can use straight away. RSS feed.
The coffee-to-water ratio, and how to adjust it
What a brew ratio like 1:16 means, the usual ratios for pour-over, French press, AeroPress, moka pot, cold brew and espresso, how many grams go in a mug, and how to fix coffee that tastes weak or bitter.
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Drawing a flowchart people can actually follow
The four flowchart shapes that matter, how to write clear steps and decisions, keeping the flow in one direction, handling loops, and when a flowchart is the wrong diagram.
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Scatter plot or line chart? How to choose
The difference between a scatter plot and a line chart, when joining the points misleads, what a trend line and correlation coefficient tell you, and what to use when there are too many points to see.
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A4, Letter and other paper sizes in pixels
How to turn a paper size into pixel dimensions, the A4 and US Letter sizes at 72, 96, 150 and 300 DPI, which DPI to design at for print or screen, and why changing the DPI setting alone does not change an image.
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Converting audio to WAV, and which settings to pick
When WAV is the right format, what sample rate and bit depth mean, how big the files get, why converting an MP3 to WAV does not improve it, and which settings suit editing, video and samplers.
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What eDPI means, and why it matters more than DPI for aim
How effective DPI combines mouse DPI and in-game sensitivity, how it relates to the distance for a full turn, typical pro ranges, and how to carry your sensitivity between games.
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How long a title tag and meta description should be
Why Google cuts titles and descriptions by pixel width rather than characters, the lengths that usually fit on desktop and mobile, what to put first, and when Google rewrites them anyway.
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What a normal map does, and how to make one from a height map
How normal maps fake surface detail in 3D, why they are purple-blue, the difference between height, bump and normal maps, OpenGL versus DirectX green channels, and how to bake one from a greyscale image.
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Regular expressions for everyday text jobs
The handful of regex pieces that cover most real tasks, with worked examples for finding emails, tidying spaces, reformatting dates and pulling numbers out of text, and the mistakes that trip people up.
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What card processing fees really cost, and how to price around them
How a percentage-plus-fixed processing fee works, why it hits small payments hardest, how to gross up a price so you receive an exact amount, and the extra fees that turn up on top.
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Break-even ROAS: the number that tells you if your ads make money
What return on ad spend means, why a ROAS of 3 can still lose money, how to calculate the break-even ROAS for a product from its margin, and what to do with the result.
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Orc names that sound right, and how to build your own
The sounds that make a name feel orcish, how clan names and earned titles work, how to make orc names that are not all interchangeable grunts, and how half-orc and drow naming differ.
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How much concrete a slab needs, and how many bags that is
The volume formula for a concrete slab in metric and imperial, how thickness changes the total, how much to add for waste, and how to turn cubic metres or yards into a bag count.
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Converting cups to grams, and why a cup of flour is not a cup of sugar
Why cups measure volume and grams measure weight, how much a cup of common ingredients weighs, the difference between US, metric and imperial cups, and why bakers switch to scales.
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How many words is a five-minute speech?
Typical speaking rates for speeches, presentations, podcasts and voiceovers, how to turn a time limit into a word count and back, and why your own pace matters more than the averages.
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Choosing a username or gamertag you will not regret in five years
What makes a handle easy to remember, available across platforms and still comfortable years later, the shapes most good usernames take, and the mistakes worth avoiding.
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What a kilowatt-hour is, and how to work out what an appliance costs to run
Watts, kilowatt-hours and the numbers on your electricity bill, with the formula for any appliance's running cost, the daily supply charge most people forget, and examples.
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Upscaling pixel art without blurring it
Why ordinary image resizing turns sprites into mush, how nearest-neighbour scaling keeps pixels crisp, why whole-number factors matter, and how to export sprites at the right size.
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BMI for women, what the number tells you and what it leaves out
How BMI is calculated, the WHO categories, why the same formula is used for women and men, and the things it cannot see, from body fat and muscle to pregnancy and age.
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Finding the tempo of a song, and turning BPM into delay times
How to find a song's BPM by ear, by tapping or with automatic detection, why detectors sometimes report half or double, and how to convert BPM into delay and LFO settings.
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Sizing a PC power supply without guessing or overspending
How to add up what a PC really draws, why GPU transient spikes matter more than the average, how much headroom to leave, and what 80 Plus ratings actually change.
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How a weighted average mark (WAM) is calculated, and what you need to hit a target
How universities turn unit marks and credit points into a WAM, why year weighting changes the answer, how WAM differs from GPA, and how to work out the marks you still need.
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Writing a tagline that sticks, and the five shapes most of them take
Most memorable taglines follow one of a handful of patterns. Here is what they are, how to test a tagline before you print it, and where a generator helps.
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How much mulch to order, and how far a cubic yard or metre goes
Work out how much mulch a garden bed needs from its area and depth, how far a cubic yard or cubic metre spreads, and when bags beat a bulk delivery.
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Old Norse names, patronymics and bynames for fiction and games
How Viking Age names were actually built, from two-part given names to -son and -dóttir patronymics and bynames like Eirik the Red, so your Norse characters sound right.
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Date arithmetic that goes wrong — inclusive days, leap years and ages
Two dates, one subtraction, and three different right answers. Why day counts disagree by one, how leap years break month arithmetic, and what an age in years actually measures.
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Currencies, landmarks and plants for a world that already has names
Once the kingdoms and rivers are named, the small nouns are what make a setting feel inhabited. How coins, landmarks and plants get their names in the real world, and how to borrow those patterns.
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Choosing a video bitrate that does not waste bandwidth
Bitrate is the only export setting that directly trades file size against picture quality. Here is how resolution, frame rate and motion set the number, and why doubling it rarely doubles what you see.
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Why a 1 TB drive shows up as 931 GB
Drive makers count in powers of ten and operating systems count in powers of two. Nothing is missing and nobody is lying — here is the arithmetic, and where GB, GiB, MB and MiB each belong.
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Fixing a stereo recording — channel swaps, width and gating
A guitar that sits on the wrong side, a field recording that collapses to the middle, and a hiss between phrases. Three faults with three fixes, and what each one does to the stereo image.
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Card hover and flip effects that survive a touchscreen
A hover effect is an interaction that half your visitors cannot perform. How to build lift, reveal and flip effects that degrade cleanly on touch, and the CSS that keeps them from sticking.
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From an SVG logo to a complete favicon set
Browsers, phones, Windows tiles and Safari pinned tabs all want a different icon file. Start from one clean SVG and the whole set takes a few minutes, with no design tool involved.
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Fluid typography with clamp(), without the guesswork
One line of CSS can replace a stack of font-size media queries, scaling text smoothly between a phone and a wide monitor. The trick is working out the middle value, and it is arithmetic rather than taste.
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Merge, split and clean PDFs without uploading them anywhere
Most "free PDF tools" send your document to a server. For contracts, bank statements and ID scans that is a bad trade. Everything here runs in your browser and the file never leaves your machine.
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How to clean up a voice recording in five steps
Trim, cut the silence, tame the background noise, even out the volume, then export at a sensible size. Done in that order, a phone recording can sound close to a studio one, and none of it needs uploading.
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How much concrete, gravel and paint to order for a DIY job
Ordering materials comes down to volume, coverage and a waste allowance. Get those three right and you stop running out mid-pour or storing half a pallet for a decade.
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How to tidy a messy list in three passes
Email addresses pasted from six places, product codes with trailing spaces, a guest list with the same person entered twice. Every messy list is cleaned the same way, and the order matters.
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How to read and write a cron expression
Five fields, a handful of symbols, and a few traps around time zones and day-of-week. Here is how to build a schedule you can trust, and how to check it before it runs at 3am.
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Writing a Content Security Policy that does not break the site
A CSP is the single most effective header against cross-site scripting, and the most common reason it is missing is that the first attempt broke the analytics. Here is how to write one incrementally.
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Open Graph images that look right everywhere
One shared link preview is built from three tags and one image, and every platform crops it differently. Here is the size to use, the tags to set, and how to check the result before you post.
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Depth of field, crop factor and field of view, explained with numbers
Three ideas explain most of why a photo looks the way it does, and all three come down to sensor size, focal length and aperture. Here is what each one actually changes and how to work it out before you buy the lens.
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Naming a fantasy world that holds together
Players remember a setting by its names, and a kingdom called Aethelmoor next to a town called Bob's Landing breaks the spell. Here is how to build a consistent set of names for a campaign or a novel, fast.
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Colour contrast that actually passes WCAG
A 4.5:1 ratio is the rule, but where it applies, how to fix a failing pair without wrecking the palette, and why the new APCA numbers sometimes disagree are the parts that trip people up.
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How to work out your freelance hourly rate
A freelance rate is not your old salary divided by 2,080. Here is the four-step method that accounts for unbillable time, overheads and tax, with the calculators to do it.
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How to compress an image for the web without it looking worse
Resize first, pick the right format second, then set quality. The order matters more than the tool, and every step here runs in your browser without uploading the file.
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Margin vs markup, and why a 50% markup is not a 50% margin
Margin is measured against the selling price, markup against the cost. Mixing them up is the most common pricing mistake in small businesses. Here is how to convert between them and check a price.
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