changelog
That ten-digit number you keep seeing in logs and APIs is just seconds counted since 1970. The new Unix time guide explains it plainly — with a live ticking timestamp and a converter that turns any number back into a date, right in your browser.
Brand new to the uke? Your first song walks you from open case to first tune — two one-finger chords, one simple strum, a two-chord song, then a third chord that opens up hundreds more. Diagrams drawn in.
The Japanese numbers guide now has a money section: yen prices, the no-cents rule, how to say ¥3,980 out loud, and the one phrase you need to ask "how much?" (ikura desu ka).
A new little section on the units of time page: a million seconds is about 11½ days, a billion is nearly 32 years, and a trillion reaches back past the Ice Age. The quickest way to feel just how much bigger a billion is than a million.
A plain-English ukulele glossary: the parts of the instrument, the playing words, the music-theory terms and the notation in tabs and chord charts — all in one place to look up whenever a new word turns up.
A new colours guide for kana: the whole palette, why some colours snap straight onto a noun (赤い車) while others need a little の (緑の車), and the famous reason a green traffic light is called "blue."
A new seasons guide for week: the 2026 equinox and solstice dates, why "first day of summer" can mean two different days, and why the hottest weeks always show up after the longest one.
A new capo guide for lele: what a capo actually does, where to clip it so it doesn't buzz, and a full chart of what every shape sounds like at each fret. The trick to playing a song in a key that fits your voice without learning a single new chord.
A new family-words guide for kana: mother, father, brothers, sisters, grandparents and the rest — and the rule nobody warns you about, that you use one humble word for your own family and a polite one for everyone else's. Plus the long-vowel trap that turns an uncle into a grandfather.
The week toolbox has a new little calculator: punch in a start and end time (plus a break, if you took one) and it tells you the length both ways — 8h 30m and 8.5 hours, the decimal form timesheets and invoices like. Late shifts that cross midnight are handled too.
Knowing what to play is the easy part — knowing how to practise is what makes it stick. The new practice guide covers little-and-often, the one-minute chord-change drill, slowing down with a metronome, and a ready-made 15-minute routine you can follow today.
A friendly walk-through of telling the time in Japanese — hours, minutes, half past, and morning vs afternoon — including the three o'clocks that stubbornly refuse to be read the normal way.
That "FY2026" on a budget can mean different dates depending on who wrote it. The new fiscal year guide explains what a financial year is, the common ones by country, how the FY labels are named, and why so many shops end their year in January.
The thing nobody tells beginners. The new how-to-hold guide covers the forearm hug that holds the uke up so your hands are free, where each hand goes, sitting vs standing, and the little mistakes that make chords buzz and hands ache.
It pops up in requests, "I'm ‑ing", permission, rules and lists of actions — the new て-form guide shows how to build it from any verb (it borrows the past-tense sound-changes) and the handful of patterns it unlocks.
Ever stared at "1430" and had to count on your fingers? The new military time guide lays out the full 12-hour to 24-hour chart, the add-12 / subtract-12 trick for converting in your head, and why midnight is written 0000.
Wood likes a steady life. The new ukulele care guide covers the humidity sweet spot that keeps it crack-free, why the car is the worst place for it, what to clean it with (and never use), and where to keep it — in plain English.
Good news for anyone learning: Japanese verbs never change for who’s doing the action. The new verbs guide lays out the three groups, the polite ます-form, and the sound-changes behind 飲んだ and 書いた.
How many paychecks each schedule gives you a year, why biweekly and semimonthly aren't the same thing, the months that quietly hand you a third paycheck, and how to turn a salary into a single payday. It's all in the new pay periods guide.
The string question every beginner trips over, finally laid out plainly: high-G vs low-G, nylon vs fluorocarbon, when to change them, and a step-by-step for restringing without the endless retuning. Meet the new strings guide.
い-words change their own ending, な-words lean on です — once you know which is which, every adjective falls into place. A new adjectives guide walks through both, with the いい curveball and the きれい trap.
Time zones, finally untangled: what UTC really is, how GMT fits in, the odd half- and quarter-hour zones, why daylight saving shifts everything twice a year, and what happens when you cross the date line. Read it in time zones and UTC explained.
A fresh guide to ukulele barre chords — clear diagrams for B♭ and the famously awkward E, what a barre actually is, the trick of sliding one shape up the neck to make a dozen chords, and how to make a barre stop buzzing. They feel impossible right up until they don't.
A new walkthrough of Japanese sentence structure: subject–object–verb order, the handy は…です frame, why every description comes before the noun, and what you're free to leave out. Find the verb and you've found the action.
Centimetres to inches, kilograms to pounds, Celsius to Fahrenheit, millilitres to cups, MB to GB — the new unit converter handles length, weight, temperature, volume, area, speed, time and data. Type a value and see it in every unit at once. Free, in your browser, nothing uploaded.
Say hello to color — pick a color or paste a HEX, RGB or HSL value and see all three at once, copy any of them in a tap, and pull a ready ramp of tints and shades. There’s a built-in contrast checker too, so you can tell at a glance whether black or white text will actually be readable on it. All in your browser, nothing uploaded.
Ever stared at a date like 04/03 and not known if it's March or April? There's now a plain-English guide to date formats — what DD/MM/YYYY, MM/DD/YYYY and the tidy ISO YYYY-MM-DD each mean, who writes which, and how to put a date down so nobody can misread it.
Say hello to pass — a little password generator. Spin up a strong random password, or a friendlier passphrase made of real words like brave-otter-maple-stone, pick the length, and copy it in a tap. Every password is made right in your browser with proper secure randomness, so nothing is ever sent or saved.
A new walkthrough of Japanese question words — the か marker that turns any sentence into a question, the whole dare / nani / doko / itsu set, the なに-vs-なん wrinkle, and the これ・それ・あれ・どれ pointing grid they all come from.
New on the ukulele guide: scales explained simply — the C major scale drawn right on the g-C-E-A fretboard, the whole-and-half-step pattern behind every major scale, and the pentatonic shortcut that makes soloing sound good with almost any note.
There's a new units of time page: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and years all laid out in one clean conversion table, the handful of numbers worth memorising, and why a year never quite divides into a round number of weeks.
Pasted something out of a PDF or email and got a paragraph chopped into a dozen short lines? The word counter now has a Line breaks row: join it all back into one line, drop the blank rows, or trim stray spaces off every line — and Undo if you change your mind.
New pronunciation guide: the five pure vowels, the soft tapped R, why pitch beats stress, the silent u in "desu", and the even mora rhythm that makes Japanese sound Japanese.
Pop music has a happy secret: most songs run on the same few chord loops. There's a new chord progressions guide — the four-chord trick, the three-chord trick, 50s doo-wop, the jazz ii–V–I and the 12-bar blues — written out in easy ukulele keys, with the numbers so you can move them anywhere.
How many days are in each month? There is now a little reference for it — the full month-by-month list, the old rhyme, the knuckle trick, and why February always gets the short end. See days in each month.
New particles guide — wa, ga, wo, ni, de and friends, each in plain English with a mini example. It explains why は is read "wa", untangles the famous は-vs-が question, and sorts out に vs で. The tiny markers that make a sentence make sense.
For the quieter end of things, there's now a fingerpicking guide — four beginner patterns (the roll, the flowing arpeggio, the pinch and an alternating thumb) drawn as little string grids, with which finger plays which string. Lovely for soft intros and lullabies.
Pick a date and see the days left until it — the weekday it lands on, the weeks-and-days breakdown, and how many of those are working days. There's a live list of days to the next holidays too, and a plain-English note on the off-by-one that catches everyone.
Buying your first ukulele and not sure which size? There's now a friendly ukulele sizes guide — the four sizes compared on length, tuning and sound, plus a plain-English steer on which one to pick for your hands and the sound you want.
Japanese makes you pick a counter word for whatever you are counting, and it trips up every learner. There is now a full Japanese counters guide — the safe default, how to count people, and reading tables with every sound change marked.
The week tool can add or subtract business days — type a date and "5 working days" and it skips the weekends for you. Perfect for "ships within 10 business days" deadlines.
The katakana guide now ends with a little Q&A — what katakana's actually for, whether it's harder than hiragana, that long dash in loanwords, and which lookalike pairs trip everyone up.
Pick a key on the ukulele app's chords tab and it shows you the seven chords that belong to it — the friendly handful most songs are built from. Tap a beginner shape to drill it in the trainer.
The word counter now scores your readability. Paste some text and it shows a reading-ease score, a school grade level, and your average sentence length and syllables per word — a quick nudge toward plainer, clearer writing.
The week tool already tells you which week a date lands in — now it goes the other way too. Pop in a year and a week number and it hands back that week's Monday-to-Sunday dates. Handy when a schedule just says "week 23" and you need the actual days.
The word counter now has a Top words panel — paste your text and it shows the words you use most, with counts and percentages, updating as you type. Great for catching a word you've repeated too often or eyeballing keyword density. It can skip the little filler words too, and like everything there, it never leaves your browser.
The week tool can now name the weekday for any date — past or future. Pop in a birthday, a deadline, or any old date and it tells you the day, whether it's a weekend, and where it lands in the year.
The ukulele app now has a little FAQ — how to tune g-C-E-A, the easiest first chords, what the island strum is, and how to move a song into your key.
The hiragana guide now ends with a little FAQ — how long it takes to learn, whether to start with hiragana or katakana, how many characters there really are, and how kana differs from kanji.
The week tools now have a friendly FAQ at the bottom — what ISO week it is, how many weeks are in a year, counting business days, percent change, and margin vs. markup, all in plain English.
The ukulele app now ends with a little guides hub — tuning, chords, strumming, reading tabs and easy first songs, each a click away. The tabs guide was a touch hard to find before; now it's right there with the rest.
The week tools have an age calculator now — give it a date of birth and it tells you the age in years, months and days, plus the totals in months, weeks and days, and counts down to the next birthday. Pop in a future date and it flips into a days-until countdown.
The week tools can do CAGR now — pop in a starting number, an ending number, and how many years it took, and you get the steady yearly growth rate (plus the total change and how many times over it grew). Handy for returns, revenue, or anything that compounds.
The word counter can swap text for you now: type what to find, what to put in its place, and hit replace all. It tells you how many it changed, undo puts it back, and as always nothing you type ever leaves your browser.
Small follow-up on the ukulele app: once you have shifted a song into your key, there is now a copy button right under it — paste the new chords straight into your notes or a message.
The ukulele app can transpose now — paste your chords, tap up or down, and the whole thing shifts to a key that suits your voice (or dodges the hard shapes). Lyrics stay put; slash chords and 7ths come along for the ride.
The week tools can now add or subtract days from any date — pick a start, type a number, and you get the date it lands on, its weekday, and which week of the year it falls in. Handy for net-30 invoices, return windows, and counting down to a deadline.
The word counter learned a few line tricks: sort a list A→Z or Z→A, strip out duplicate lines, or flip the whole thing upside down. Perfect for a column pasted from a spreadsheet — and like everything there, it all happens in your browser.
The home page grew a little “Guides & references” section — quick links to every explainer hiding inside the tools, from reading katakana to counting business days to reading ukulele tabs. Easier to find the good stuff without digging.
New kana guide on how to actually type Japanese — you type romaji and your computer turns it into kana and kanji. How to switch it on (Windows, Mac, phone), the four keystrokes that trip everyone up (ん, small っ, きゃ, the ー bar), and how the space bar swaps kana for kanji.
Paste something into the counter and you can flip it to UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case or Sentence case in one click — plus a tidy-up button for stray spaces and an Undo if you change your mind. Same as ever: it all happens in your browser, nothing gets uploaded.
Dakuten and that small circle, the tiny ゃゅょ combos, the half-size っ that doubles a letter, and long vowels — the four moves that turn the basic chart into the whole language. It is all on the new sounds page.
No, 2026 is not — the next one is 2028. The new leap year page has the rule in plain English, why 1900 and 2100 get skipped but 2000 did not, a list of leap years, and a few facts about 29 February.
Meet count — paste any text and watch the words, characters, sentences and reading time tick up as you type. It all runs in your browser, so nothing you write ever leaves the page. Good for essays, posts and anything with a limit.
A new days, months & dates page rounds out the kana corner: the seven weekdays and the elements hiding inside them, all twelve months (and why April is shigatsu), the slippery dates from tsuitachi to hatsuka, plus today, tomorrow and yesterday.
If song tabs have ever looked like a wall of dashes, there’s now a friendly guide to reading ukulele tab — what the four lines mean, melody versus chords, and the handful of little symbols, with worked examples you can try.
Hiragana and katakana finally have their big sibling. The new beginner's guide to kanji explains what these characters actually are, the two-readings thing that trips everyone up, your first dozen kanji (with the days of the week thrown in nearly free), how radicals quietly build the complicated ones, and roughly how many you really need to read. Less scary than it looks, promise.
A friendly business-days reference: the quick formula for counting working days between two dates, a couple of worked examples, why public holidays move the goalposts, and a month-by-month table of 2026 (261 working days in all — and yes, July and December tie for the most). It even tots up the working days left in this month for you.
A tidy guide to calendar quarters: which months and dates fall in each quarter, how many days they hold, a quick month-to-quarter lookup, halves of the year, and why a company’s fiscal Q1 might not be January at all. It even tells you which quarter you are in right now.
Short answer: 52 — but every few years there is a sneaky 53rd. There is now a little explainer for the 52-vs-53 rule, a year-by-year table from 2020 to 2040 (the 53-week years marked), and why that extra week quietly trips up payroll and planners. Yes, 2026 is one of them.
A friendly starter phrasebook for Japanese: greetings through the day, please and thank you, yes and no, meeting someone, the lovely call-and-response phrases around coming home and sitting down to eat, and what to say when you are politely stuck — each with the kana, the romaji, and when to use it.
A new guide to Japanese numbers: one to ten in kanji, hiragana and romaji, why four, seven and nine each have two readings, how to build any number up to the thousands, the little sound changes nobody warns you about (sanbyaku, roppyaku, happyaku…), and the counters you bump into everywhere. Learn ten words and a couple of rules and you can say almost anything.
A small new corner of the box. Every day has a theme (a regret, a small win, a memory from childhood…). You read six words a stranger left for you, then leave six words for the next visitor. No accounts, no identity, just a tiny note in the wind. Have a look.
kana. now has a side-by-side comparison of the two scripts: every sound written both ways in one chart, when you'd reach for each, the shapes that look alike, and which one to learn first. A friendly bridge between the two guides.
Four new companion pages to the practice app: how to tune your ukulele (G-C-E-A, by ear or with a tuner), a printable chord chart with 45 shapes drawn finger-by-finger, a list of easy songs sorted by how many chords they need, and the strumming patterns that bring it all to life — island strum included. Tune up, learn a few shapes, find a rhythm, play a song.
There's now a week number calendar for 2026 — all 53 ISO weeks with their Monday-to-Sunday dates, grouped by quarter, with this week highlighted. 2025 and 2027 are one tap away. (Yes, 2026 really does have a 53rd week.)
The hiragana guide grew a sibling: a full katakana reference with the chart, the lookalike trio (シ ツ ソ ン), the long-vowel bar, and the extra katakana used for foreign words.
The front page was scrolling itself into a corner on small screens. Fixed — links and wordmark stay where you can reach them.
Tiny ukulele practice site is now linked from the splash in warm honey. Each tool also picked up its own accent color so the line-up reads at a glance.
kana. got a proper hiragana guide, and week. gained a reference section that explains the formulas behind each calculator. Less guessing, more knowing.
Slate-ink background, soft sage-teal accents, a quieter feel. The tools themselves keep their own colors.