Media & Files guides

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Media & Files File Inspector: A Complete Guide to In-Browser File Forensics What every tab does and the forensics concepts behind them — magic bytes, hashes, entropy, strings, carving, hex editing, PE/ELF analysis, steganography, and threat-intel exports, all 100% client-side. 16 min read Media & Files Magic Numbers: How File Signatures Identify Any File The few bytes at the start of a file reveal what it really is — far more reliably than its extension. How magic numbers work, why they matter, and how to read them. 9 min read Media & Files File Integrity & Hashing: How Checksums Prove a File Is Untampered A hash turns any file into a short, unique fingerprint. How hashing works, which algorithms to trust, and how checksums verify that a download arrived intact and unaltered. 11 min read Media & Files Raw Binary Data Architecture: How Bytes Become Files Bits, bytes, hex, endianness, and how numbers and text are encoded into the raw binary that every file is made of — the foundation behind hex editors and file forensics. 10 min read Media & Files HEIC vs JPG: Which Image Format Should You Use? Why iPhones save HEIC, how it compares to JPG on quality and file size, and when converting makes sense. 5 min read Media & Files Image Formats Explained: Raster, Vector, Compression & When to Use Each A plain-language map of how image formats actually work — pixels vs paths, lossy vs lossless compression, colour depth and transparency — and a practical guide to picking the right one. 12 min read Media & Files Lossy vs Lossless Image Compression: What Actually Happens to Your Pixels How PNG shrinks an image without losing a pixel, how JPEG throws detail away to get ten times smaller, what generation loss really is, and how to choose the right trade-off. 10 min read Media & Files PNG vs JPEG vs WebP vs AVIF: Which Image Format Should You Use? A practical head-to-head of the four formats that matter on the modern web — file size, quality, transparency, animation and browser support — with a clear decision guide. 11 min read Media & Files Colour Depth, Channels & Alpha Transparency Explained What a pixel really stores — bit depth, RGB/CMYK/grayscale channels, the alpha channel and transparency, indexed palettes, and the gotchas that bite you when converting. 10 min read Media & Files Sound, Frequency & the FFT: How a Spectrum Analyzer Sees Audio How the Fourier transform pulls a sound wave apart into its frequencies, what a spectrum and spectrogram show, the time-vs-frequency trade-off, and how frequency maps to musical notes. 11 min read