Hobby Tools

Thirty calculators, and every published figure says whose it is

**Where an answer has a consequence, the tool says who decides.** The lye calculator carries the safety notes for handling a caustic and says a recipe must be checked before it is made. The chocolate tool gives a risk band and says, on every result including the lowest, that a vet decides. The pet food portions say the same. None of those three is a judgement this application is entitled to make.

**Every published figure is named and sourced to a kind.** A saponification value, a yarn's metres a hundred grams, a wax's density, a filament's grams a metre and a circle of confusion are all published numbers for a *kind* of thing, not measurements of the thing in front of you — and each tool says what beats it: the bottle, the ball band, the spool, the packet.

**A pattern, a recipe and a schedule are starting points.** A gauge swatch is the measurement that matters and the pattern's gauge is somebody else's; a planting date is an offset from *your* last frost rather than a date; a watering interval is a plant in a room this cannot see.

**Nothing about a person or an animal is stored.** The baby log, the allowance tracker and the chore rota take what you type, work it out and forget it: no account, no server, no history. The results say so, because the opposite is the norm in every one of those categories.

Making

Yarn needed
Metres and balls for a garment, from its size, the yarn weight and your gauge.

Gauge converter
Rewrites a pattern's stitch and row counts for the gauge you actually get.

Quilt fabric
Blocks, piecing, backing, wadding and binding for a quilt of a given size.

Cross stitch sizing
Turns a stitch count into a finished size and the fabric to cut, margin included.

Candle making
Wax, fragrance and wick size for a jar of a given volume, headspace allowed for.

Soap lye calculator
Lye and water for a blend of oils, from published saponification values.

Resin volume
Resin for a mould of a given shape, split into its two parts by weight.

Living things

Baby day log
Adds a day of feeds, sleeps and nappies up, and works out the gaps.

Nappy usage
Counts nappies a day for a baby's age and what the packs will cost.

Plant watering rota
How often each plant wants water, for the season, the light and the room.

Pet food portions
Works out the daily ration from weight, life stage and the packet's energy.

Dog chocolate risk
Works the theobromine dose out and shows the whole published ladder.

Gestation dates
The published range a litter is due over, for ten common species.

Aquarium volume
The water actually in a tank, the filter flow it wants and the dose.

Planting calendar
Sowing and planting dates counted from your own last frost, not from a date.

Care label reader
Names what each symbol on a label means, and which family said nothing.

Plans

Gift budget planner
Splits a budget between the people on the list and shows what is left to buy.

Wedding budget planner
Splits a wedding budget into the usual categories, with a reserve taken off first.

Chore rota
Deals the household jobs out over the days and says how the minutes fell.

Allowance and chores
Adds up what each child's tasks came to, with a base and a share put by.

Printing

3D print cost
Material, power, machine wear and a failure rate, with a margin if you want one.

Filament length and weight
Any one of length, weight or volume gives the other two, and what is left on the spool.

Depth of field
Near, far and hyperfocal, with the circle of confusion shown as the judgement it is.

ND filter exposure
What the exposure becomes behind a filter, with the whole density table beside it.

Photo storage
How much disk a shoot wants, in the format you chose and the copies you keep.

Music

Circle of fifths
Every key with its signature, its relative and the seven chords built on its scale.

Chord progressions
Fourteen patterns that recur in published music, written out in your key.

Transpose a chart
Moves the chords and leaves the words exactly where they were.

Capo position
Which fret turns shapes you know into the key you want, and how it plays.

Chord diagrams
Draws the shapes you type as boxes, with the notes they sound underneath.

Questions

Why is a planting date an offset rather than a date?: Because the same date is two months wrong four hundred kilometres away. What a sowing table actually gives is a number of weeks either side of the last frost, and the last frost is yours. Give it one and the offsets become dates; leave it out and the answer stays in weeks, which is the form that travels.
Why does the care label reader use words rather than the symbols?: Because the symbols are not characters. Unicode has no washtub with forty in it, so a tool of this kind either ships pictures — which nothing here does — or names them. Naming them also makes the result searchable and readable aloud. It says which of the five families your label said nothing about, because a missing symbol is not permission.
Do the music tools play anything?: No: this framework has no audio at all, and the tools say so. What they give is the notation — the circle with every signature worked out, fourteen progressions in your key, a chart moved to another key with the words left exactly where they were, and the shapes drawn as boxes.
Why is there no food, drug or breed database anywhere in it?: Same reason the text tools ship no dictionary. A table small enough to ship answers confidently about the few things it knows and says nothing about the rest, and the reader never sees which just happened. The figures come off the packet, the bottle or the ball band in front of you, and the tools say so.

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