Tools

Every so often I hit a small annoyance often enough that it’s faster to build the fix than to keep working around it. These are the ones that turned out useful enough to share — built for me first, then for whoever I kept sending them to.

What I’ve built

• pdfzeug — PDF wrangling without the upload-to-a-random-website dance. Merge, split, and squeeze files down to something you can actually email.
• IBAN checker — Paste an IBAN, find out instantly whether it’s valid and which bank it belongs to. Catches the transposed digit before your money goes wandering.
• Company LEI lookup — Find any company’s Legal Entity Identifier and the official record behind it: legal name, registered address, status, and who owns whom. GLEIF’s registry, minus the clunky search.
• VAT checker — Check an EU VAT number against the official VIES register and see the business it belongs to. Worth a glance before you invoice a new client across a border.
• eSIM — Buy a data eSIM for wherever you’re headed and be online before you’ve left the airport.