Blog
Guides to the math behind the tools — readability formulas, pricing your work, sizing a build, and planning a game world.
Turning a two-car garage into a workshop: epoxy floor and LED bench lighting
A 22 × 22 ft garage becomes a workshop: epoxy kits, primer and flake for 484 sq ft, then a 24V LED layout for the bench wall, with a full example budget.
Fixing a soggy backyard in the right order: drain, raised beds, then a small deck
One wet yard, three projects in sequence: a 64 ft French drain, three raised beds and a 10 × 11.5 ft deck, worked through three calculators into one order.
Rewriting a patient leaflet to plain language: SMOG, Dale–Chall and passive voice, before and after
One medication leaflet paragraph taken from SMOG 16.1 to 7.5 in two edits, with Dale–Chall word lists, passive-voice counts and what each score misses.
Food and drink for a 120-guest evening wedding, planned as one shopping list
A 5-hour reception with a buffet and late snacks, run through the catering and alcohol calculators together: guest counts, kids, timing and one budget.
Pricing articulated dragons from a two-printer farm: power per print, unit cost, then Etsy fees
A two-printer shop restocks 80 articulated dragons: electricity per plate, a full unit cost, and the Etsy price that survives fees, with every number from the tools.
Prepping a D&D travel session: road days, fight length and check odds
One four-hour session, a 60-mile trek to a ruin: how many days on the road, how many fights fit at the table, and which DCs give the odds you want.
The pre-publish check for a how-to blog post: readability, keywords, meta tags and reading time
One 1,240-word how-to draft edited in four passes: consensus readability, keyword density, title and description width, then the reading-time label.
Craft fair booth or Etsy listing? Costing one soy candle and running both sales channels
One 8 oz soy candle, costed once, then sold two ways: a $110 holiday fair booth and an Etsy listing. Worked numbers from three calculators, side by side.
One 90,000-word novel, three formats: from draft plan to Kindle, paperback and audiobook royalties
A half-written 90k novel run through four calculators: finish date, pages, Kindle and paperback royalties at current KDP rules, audiobook hours and ACX pay.
Your laser-cut wholesale price might be below cost — here is the markup that fixes it
Wholesale is usually shown as 60% of retail, which quietly makes it a function of your retail markup rather than a margin you set. Below a 67% markup that number drops under your production cost, and here is the arithmetic that proves it.
What does "28mm scale" actually divide by? The hidden ratio behind heroic-scale terrain
Six feet divided by 28 millimetres is 1:65, but every terrain converter says 28mm is 1:60. The gap is a measurement convention, not a rounding error — and it decides whether your buildings sit right next to your miniatures.
Scattergories over a long game night: repeated categories, sticky settings, and a clock that can run slow
A single Scattergories round is easy to set up fairly. Ten rounds in a row is a different problem — the category bank runs shallower than you think, the tool remembers last week's settings, and the countdown counts ticks rather than seconds.
From "1 in 12 packs" to real odds: translating official pull-rate sheets
Games publish pull rates in half a dozen incompatible formats — guaranteed slots, upgrade rates, per-card percentages. How to convert each one into the calculator's two inputs, and when the independent-pack model stops applying.
Wiring several LED strip runs to one power supply
How the load of parallel strip runs stacks onto a single supply, why each run still keeps its own voltage-drop budget, and when the calculator is really telling you to split the job across two supplies.
Will your solar panels actually keep up with your daily load?
Runtime and recharge time are two numbers a power-station calculator reports separately — but whether you can run indefinitely depends on daily solar harvest versus daily draw, which turns on sun-hours the tool never asks for.
TDP isn't watts drawn: reading a PC parts list into real power
The CPU and GPU numbers you copy off a spec sheet are thermal ratings, not measured draw — the gap runs both ways. Plus what the calculator's fixed per-component figures assume, and the second safety margin it adds on top of yours.
Running low- and high-gravity worlds: turning surface g into table rules
Once you have picked a planet's surface gravity, how do you actually play it? Concrete rules for jump distance, fall damage, carrying capacity, movement, and long-term strain — all keyed to the one number that drives them.
How to choose a RAID level: matching redundancy to how much you can lose
RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10 make different trades between usable space, fault tolerance, rebuild risk, and performance. A practical decision guide for picking the level that fits your drive count, capacity, and tolerance for downtime.
The wedding bar budget: turning a drink count into what you actually spend
A shopping list of cases and bottles is only half the job. How bar format, buy-back policies, signature cocktails, and where you buy turn that quantity into a real cost — and how to trim it without leaving guests dry.
Why a cheap KDP paperback can earn you nothing: the print-cost floor explained
Amazon pays paperback royalty as 60% of price minus a print cost that rises with page count. Below a break-even list price the royalty hits zero — here is how to find that floor before you publish.