Editorial Policy and Data Sources

This page explains who makes Pocketool and how, where the data in the tools comes from, which content is AI generated, and how mistakes are corrected. It covers this site (www.pocketool.app) and the tool sites hosted under it. This policy was last updated on October 11, 2026.

Who makes it

Pocketool is made and maintained by Casper. He is a co-founder of HexSchool, studied visual design before becoming a software engineer, and teaches online courses. He has taken part in the iThome Ironman writing contest for several years running and writes the personal technical blog Casper Blog (in Chinese). His full background is on the About page.

Pocketool has no editorial team and no other credited authors.

How it is made

• Working with AI tools: Casper decides which tools to build and which topics to write about, and sets the rules for writing, fact checking and pre-release checks. The code and the explanatory text are written by Casper together with AI development tools, following those rules.
• English pages: the English pages of this site, under /en/, are made the same way: AI tools translate or adapt them from the Chinese pages under the same rules. Pages such as the tool guides broadly follow the Chinese page, while pages such as the home page are written separately for English readers. Where an English page and its Chinese counterpart disagree, the Chinese page is the reference.
• Automated checks before release: anything a program can check is left to automated checks, such as the build audit this site runs on every build (titles, addresses, structured data and privacy checks), and the Office Life Calculator's unit tests, which compare its answers with the output of the Ministry of Labor's official calculators.
• Official sources for figures, regulations and specifications: sources are cited on the page, so you can check them yourself. Articles on the Office Life Calculator, Pixel Smith, English Shadowing and Device Tester show a check date, the day the official source was actually compared against.
• Saying what a tool cannot do: for example, English Shadowing gives no pronunciation score, and Device Tester shows the signals the browser receives without diagnosing hardware. Every tool's results are for reference only; see the disclaimer.

Data sources by site

Below are the external data, versions and check dates each site uses. The figures in the tools follow these official or public sources; this site converts formats and does the calculations.

Taiwan ZIP Code Lookup

• ZIP codes: Chunghwa Post's 3+3 ZIP code application system, version V2602_260427 (released April 27, 2026), synced by this site on May 29, 2026: 80,134 address ranges and 12,953 3+3 codes.
• English addresses: Chunghwa Post's Chinese-English table of roads and streets, version 1130401, and its Chinese-English table of cities, counties and townships, version 10906, downloaded on July 12, 2026 and used under the Open Government Data License, version 1.0. The few road names missing from the official files are filled in with romanisation rules, and those results are marked.
• Updates: this site syncs each new Chunghwa Post release by hand, so it lags the official data a little. Before sending important mail, check again on the Chunghwa Post website. Versions and the update process are on the ZIP code site's about page (in Chinese).

Office Life Calculator

• Labour calculators (annual leave, overtime pay, severance pay and voluntary labour pension contributions) follow the Labor Standards Act, the Labor Pension Act and rulings by the competent authorities. The formulas and legal basis are on each page, along with this site's check date, and a page shows a reminder by itself when it has gone too long without a fresh check.
• Checked against the official calculators: only overtime pay and severance pay (both in Chinese) are tested against the output of the Ministry of Labor's official calculators: 4,883 cases for overtime pay and 6,266 for severance pay, 11,149 in all (generated on September 22, 2026). Where this site's method differs from the official calculator, the overtime pay page has a section explaining why.
• The subsidised first home loan calculator uses figures published by the Ministry of Finance, its National Treasury Administration and the Executive Yuan, and is rechecked after every board meeting of the central bank.
• Money calculators (compound interest, regular investing, FIRE, mortgages and others) are formula calculations: you enter the assumptions, and the formula is on the same page.

Kaomoji Garden

• Emoji: names and search keywords come from Unicode Emoji 17.0 and Unicode CLDR 48.2 (© Unicode, Inc., used under the Unicode License v3). The site currently shows emoji up to Emoji 16.0, 1,906 in all. The emoji on screen are drawn by your device's font, and no vendor images are used.
• Kaomoji and symbols: 1,795 kaomoji, 641 special symbols and 565 symbol combinations, sorted by this site by mood, theme or use, with names and tags in Chinese and English.
• Emoji combos: submitted by visitors and published without review in advance, then handled when reported.
• The full licence text and contact details are on Kaomoji Garden's about page.

Pixel Smith Image Tools

• ID photo specifications: the passport photo size chart lists 8 specifications, the printed photos for US, UK, Canadian, Australian and Taiwan passports plus the online photo rules for the UK, Canada and Taiwan. They are copied from 7 official pages of the US Department of State, GOV.UK, the Government of Canada, the Australian Passport Office and Taiwan's Bureau of Consular Affairs, checked on September 29, 2026. Fields the official sources leave out are left blank, not guessed. The Chinese version of the chart, written for readers in Taiwan, also covers photos for Taiwan ID cards, driving licences and international driving permits and for US visas.
• Photo processing: photos are processed in your browser. Downloads from the ID copy watermark, Blur, pixelate or add text and the Photo Editor are redrawn, so they carry no capture data such as EXIF or GPS. When HEIC to JPG or the Image converter saves a JPG, it removes the GPS location by default and keeps the other details, such as the capture time and phone model; you can switch to removing everything or keeping everything.

English Shadowing

• Subtitles: from the YouTube video itself, with each sentence timed as YouTube provides it.
• CEFR levels: each sentence's level is an estimate. Words are sorted into six levels by how often they appear, using the open word frequency data wordfreq 3.1.1, and the sentence's level is worked out from its words. It is not a CEFR word list compiled for teaching, and it is not a test score. The level descriptions are summarised from the Council of Europe's CEFR global scale.
• How sentences are split and levelled is explained on English Shadowing's about page and in the development note How YouTube subtitles are split into sentences, both in Chinese.

Pocket Word King

• Score bands (TOEIC 200 to 990) are only difficulty groups, showing roughly which level of test question a word tends to appear in. They are not test scores, and comparisons with CEFR, GEPT and similar scales only describe rough difficulty. TOEIC® is a registered trademark of ETS, and Pocket Word King is not affiliated with ETS.
• Word and phrase audio is AI speech synthesis; see "AI generated content" below. An introduction and FAQ are on Pocket Word King's guide page.

QR Code Maker

• Formats: each kind of QR code uses the standard format phone cameras recognise, such as WIFI: for WiFi and vCard 3.0 for contact cards. Check digits for EAN-13, EAN-8 and ITF-14 follow the rules of GS1, the international barcode organisation.
• Generating and scanning both happen in your browser. The open source packages used and their licences are listed on QR Code Maker's about page (in Chinese).

Device Tester

• Test results: what you see are the mouse, keyboard, sound, microphone and camera signals the browser receives or plays, not a hardware diagnosis. The sound test only plays sound, never records, and is not a hearing test. The mic and webcam tests ask for permission only after you press Start, and the recording and picture are not uploaded.
• Articles: JavaScript Key Codes is based on the W3C UI Events specification and the MDN documentation. Device Tester's articles are written from manufacturers' official support pages, standards and regulations; each one shows its check date, and none carries sales, price comparison or affiliate links.

Office Tools

• Days off: the calendar lookup and the date calculator follow the government office calendar published by the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration (on Taiwan's open government data platform). The Japanese holiday calendar in the separate Japanese section follows the national holidays CSV published by Japan's Cabinet Office.
• Name masking can apply the masking rules of the Taipei City Government's standard procedure for masking personal data in one click.
• The condominium meeting quorum calculator works out thresholds under Articles 31 and 32 of the Condominium Administration Act and marks the one-fifth cap in Article 27. Its results are not legal advice, and where the building's own rules say otherwise, those rules apply.
• Lists and files are processed only in your browser; see the Office Tools privacy notice (in Chinese).

Word counter, Chinese numerals and Chinese conversion

• Word and Character Counter uses Unicode to tell Chinese characters, punctuation and emoji apart. Emoji built from several characters, such as families, skin tones and flags, count as one character, following Unicode's list of RGI emoji.
• Chinese Number Converter (in Chinese) follows the Central Bank's instructions for National Treasury account cheques, the supplementary rules of the Taiwan Clearing House, a reply from the Kaohsiung National Taxation Bureau of the Ministry of Finance, and Article 7 of the Negotiable Instruments Act. For cases Taiwan's official documents do not cover, it refers to the People's Bank of China rules for filling in bills, with the reasoning given on the tool page. The tax-inclusive and tax-exclusive mode only handles the 5% business tax under the general method: the rate follows Article 10 of the Value-added and Non-value-added Business Tax Act and the taxation methods page on the Ministry of Finance's tax portal, prices that include business tax and how invoices are issued follow Article 32, rounding of the tax follows Article 14, and working back from a tax-inclusive amount follows Article 32-1 of the Act's Enforcement Rules and the Ministry of Finance's directions for filing and paying business tax electronically. Taiwan's regulations set no format for amounts in English: SAY TOTAL … ONLY on invoices follows a trade practice book from the Taiwan Academy of Banking and Finance, number spelling follows the US GPO Style Manual, and NN/100 on cheques follows explanations by US banks (Chase and Capital One). Where usage differs, such as ONLY and how cents are written, the options sit side by side, and none is claimed to be the standard.
• Simplified and Traditional Chinese Converter (in Chinese) uses the dictionaries of OpenCC, the Open Chinese Convert project (Apache License 2.0), packaged by opencc-js 1.4.2 (MIT licence) and not modified by this site: Simplified to Traditional uses s2twp (which also switches to common Taiwan wording), and Traditional to Simplified uses tw2s (which changes characters only). The dictionaries match word by word without understanding whole sentences. When conversion goes wrong, with real examples, is explained on the tool page, and every conversion example on the tool page is run through the same dictionaries by a test program to confirm it matches what the page says.

AI generated content

Beyond the code and text collaboration described above, the following content is generated directly by AI:

• Illustrations and site logos: the Pocketool otter mascot; the logos of the Office Life Calculator, English Shadowing, Device Tester, Office Tools and QR Code Maker; QR Code Maker's default share image; and the illustrations in Kaomoji Garden, English Shadowing and Device Tester articles and the header illustrations of Office Life Calculator articles are all made with AI image tools. Kaomoji Garden, English Shadowing and Device Tester label AI generated illustrations on the article page itself.
• Audio: word and phrase audio in Pocket Word King is AI speech synthesis, with example sentences voiced by 9 characters.
• Video summaries and outlines: when English Shadowing adds a new video, it passes the video's basic details and English subtitles to Cloudflare Workers AI to produce a Chinese summary, topics and an outline. When an outline does not come from the video's own chapters, the page labels it as AI generated.
• Practice sentences: the English sentences in English Shadowing's sentence drill are produced by AI, checked by a program for length and vocabulary, and reviewed for grammar by a second AI pass before going live. The Chinese translations shown after you answer are AI translations too, and may read a little unnaturally.

Privacy and data handling

• Most tools run in your browser: the Word and Character Counter, the Chinese Number Converter, the Simplified and Traditional Chinese Converter, the Taiwan ZIP Code Lookup and its address translator, QR Code Maker, Pixel Smith, Device Tester and Office Tools do not upload the text, addresses, lists, images or test data you enter to this site's servers (the Pixel Smith Photo Editor's cloud save is the exception; see the sign-in features below).
• The Office Life Calculator also calculates in your browser, but 8 of its pages, including compound interest, mortgage and floor area conversion, write the figures you enter into the address so you can bookmark that calculation, and those addresses, figures included, reach Google Analytics reports. The overtime pay, severance pay and annualised return pages write no figures into the address.
• Only a few optional features need a sign-in, and every tool's main job works without one: syncing practice history in English Shadowing, submitting emoji combos in Kaomoji Garden (comments, reports and syncing favourites need a sign-in too), the Pixel Smith Photo Editor's cloud save, and in Pocket Word King, keeping progress and settings beyond the current tab and taking the TOEIC mock test.
• What reaches this site without a sign-in: English Shadowing records which videos are opened and practised (without your identity), and pasting a YouTube video it has not added yet creates a public video page. Kaomoji Garden counts which emoji combos are copied (without your identity).
• Ads and analytics: some pages under www.pocketool.app carry Google AdSense ads and Google Analytics traffic statistics.

What each tool stores, how long it is kept and how to delete it is set out in full in the Privacy Policy.

Updates and corrections

• The date, version and content of every release on each site are recorded in the changelog (in Chinese).
• Articles show their date, plus an updated date when the content changes. Pages with a check date (see How it is made) also show the last day the official source was compared against.
• If you find a typo, a wrong calculation, outdated data or a wrong statement, tell Casper on the contact page, with the address and what you saw. Once it is confirmed, the page is corrected, and larger corrections ship as a new version recorded in the changelog.
• To ask for an account to be deleted or content to be removed, or to send a rights notice, follow the instructions on the contact page.