Lead story
Compressing images for the web without visible quality loss
Most images on the web are two to five times heavier than they need to be. A repeatable process — right size, right format, right quality — fixes that in minutes.
TheLab.
Notes on software, tools and digital work — what to buy, how to use it, and what we learned building our own.
- Perpetual licence or subscription? How to decide for software you rely onThe cheaper option over one year is often the more expensive one over four. A simple way to compare total cost, update needs and risk.
- Buying Windows 11 Pro: what the licence actually coversRetail, OEM and volume licences behave differently when you change hardware. What to check before you buy, and how upgrading from Home works.
- Fixing invalid JSON: the eight errors behind most failuresJSON is strict in ways JavaScript is not. These are the mistakes that break parsers most often, how to spot them, and how to fix each one.
- Removing backgrounds without AI: how far colour distance gets youAn experiment in background removal with no machine learning — just flood fill and colour distance. How it works, where it excels and where it fails.
- WCAG contrast, explained with numbers you can useWhat 4.5:1 actually measures, when 3:1 is enough, and how to fix a failing colour pair without changing your palette's character.