About Gerald Ho

shinmuscat is one word and the name of this tool site: a software project, not the grape.

I'm Gerald Ho. shinmuscat is my answer to every online tool that says "free" on the landing page, then asks for an account, an email, a card number or a paid upgrade the moment you try to use it. I kept hitting those walls, so I built my own versions of the tools I needed and put them up for everyone.

Most of them run directly in your browser, on your own device. Your files are never uploaded and there is no server doing the work, so there is no bill that grows with every person who uses them. That is how they stay free, with no login, no ads, no watermark and no daily cap, and I am not adding any of those.

TikTok Transcript

This is where it started. I kept needing the text out of TikTok videos, and every free tool wanted an account before it would hand over a caption file. Paste a public link and shinmuscat reads the captions the video already has, then gives them back as plain text, or as SRT or VTT with timestamps. It is the one tool with a small server step, because TikTok does not let a browser fetch its captions directly. All the server does is read that caption file, so it costs very little to run.

Media Transcriber

Drop in an audio or video file, such as MP3, MP4, MOV or WAV, and get a transcript back. The speech recognition model downloads once and runs on your machine, so a recording of a private call never leaves your computer. It also covers what the TikTok tool cannot: download a YouTube or Instagram video and transcribe the file here.

Screen Recorder

Recording Google Meet calls kept going wrong for me. QuickTime kept closing around the 15-minute mark, and the online recorders I tried either did not capture the call or put a login in front of the record button. This one records your screen, your camera or both, adds no watermark, keeps the video on your computer, and can turn the recording into a transcript on your own machine. To record a Meet call, share the Meet tab with tab audio on and keep your microphone on so your own voice is in it too.

PDF Tools

Merging two PDFs should not need a subscription. You can view, merge and split PDFs, convert PDF to Word and Word to PDF, and export pages as images. A lot of free PDF sites upload your document to their servers first, which is a bad deal when the file is a contract or a payslip. Here the file stays in your browser the whole time.

Image Editor

Photoshop charges a steep monthly subscription just to edit a file with layers, and the free alternatives I tried were not good enough to replace it. So I built a layered editor with masks, blend modes, selections, text and filters, plus an AI Select Subject that runs on your device. It opens and saves PSD files, so you can work on a layered file without paying for a plan.

Video Editor

The free version of CapCut used to do everything I needed. Then CapCut put something as basic as detaching the audio from a video behind a paid subscription, which is a ridiculous thing to charge for. So I built a video editor where that is free, along with everything else. Cut and split clips on a timeline, detach and edit the audio, add text, grade the colour and export an MP4 with no watermark. The whole render happens in your browser, and it works best in Chrome, Brave or Edge.

Infinite Canvas

I wanted a whiteboard I could open and use without an account. This one opens a blank board straight away. It has notes, shapes, arrows that follow what they are attached to, pen, emoji and pictures, and it keeps your boards in your own browser. It is for working alone, with no live sharing: to pass a board on, you save a file and send it.

Who is behind it

One person runs all seven. If one of them saved you time, the tip jar is open, but nothing is locked behind it.

The rest of my time goes to Axecute, where I teach people in Singapore to work with CLI coding agents like Claude Code, Codex and Grok, one to one. I build tools like these on the side, mostly to fix something that annoyed me and had no clean free answer.

If something is broken or you want a feature that is missing, the fastest way to reach me is through my GitHub profile. Walkthroughs of each tool are on the shinmuscat YouTube channel.