Who's behind it
I'm Attiq. My day job is network security: I'm a Security Implementation Consultant and I teach Check Point firewall courses to working engineers. I hold the CISSP, Check Point CCSM Elite and Cisco CCNP Security certifications, which mostly means I spend a lot of time working out why something that should work, doesn't.
Key & Pixel started because I kept reaching for the same small tools — at work, in the classroom and at home — and kept landing on pages that were mostly adverts with a half-working tool in the middle. A keyboard tester that only listed key codes. A chess clock that drifted. A character counter that counted one emoji as two characters. So I built the versions I wanted and put them here for anyone to use.
What this site is
Free utilities that run in your web browser: hardware testers for keyboards, mice, screens, cameras and microphones; timers and clocks that keep accurate time; text tools that handle unicode properly; and network tools for checking your connection, DNS, ports and certificates. There's no account and nothing to install — the page you open is the tool.
How the tools work
- Most tools never leave your device. The hardware testers, timers and text tools process your keystrokes, mouse movements, camera and microphone streams and any text you paste locally. Nothing is sent anywhere — you can check this yourself in your browser's network panel.
- Network tools need a server, and say so. A browser can't run a DNS, WHOIS, port, SSL or header check by itself, so those tools (and the speed test) send the lookup through the site's own server and show you the result. Nothing is kept afterwards.
- Each tool explains itself. Under every tool there's a plain-English guide: what it measures, how to read the result and what to do next. The network guides are closest to my day job, so they're written the way I'd explain things in a class.
- Tested against the best. Before a tool goes live I compare it with the most-used alternatives and make sure it does everything they do, then at least one thing more. Every tool also has its own automated tests that run each day against the live site.
- It keeps improving. Every week I go through what people use, what gets reported as broken and what's missing, and fix or add things.
How the site is funded
Key & Pixel is free to use. Any adverts on the site are clearly labelled and kept below the tools, so they never get in the way of using them. There's no data to sell — the tools don't collect any.
Get in touch
Found a bug, want a tool, or spotted something wrong in a guide? Send me a message — I read every one myself.
Looking for something specific? Start with the hardware testers, the timers, the text tools, the network tools or the everyday tools.