Tools

Man working with tools
I'd never joke about an AI-generated man playing with his tool

This is my collection of tools which I work on and add to from time to time. Some are hosted here, others are on GitHub. If you have any questions about any of them, feel free to email me at bobosola@gmail.com.

OS Terrain 50

My OS Terrain 50 page demos my code to read Ordnance Survey OS Terrain 50 Elevation Data in Rust & PHP. Possibly useful for anyone wanting to do anything with UK elevation data. It is very fast. On an M1 Mac Mini it retrieved 18,485 elevations along a line between the north of Scotland and the Isle of Wight in just under 30ms.

Image Convert

My Image Converter page converts common image files for use on websites. It produces WebP and (optionally) JPEG files. You can also reduce the image size and adjust the image compression quality if you want to. This is a private and very fast image converter because your images never leave your device. They are converted locally in your browser and sent to your Downloads folder. If there is more than one image converted, they will be added together in a ZIP file. You can select (or drag and drop) multiples of images in one go for bulk conversion. For a deep technical explanation of how this works (Javascript, Rust and WASM) go to the GitHub explanation page.

Image Convert CLI

Image Convert on GitHub. This is a command line version of the above for normal humans who can never remember the zillion scary commands in FFmpeg or ImageMagick or some other monster image editing application. More about how and why I wrote this in the blog.

Media File Date Fixer (mfdf)

mfdf is available now for Windows 10/11 on the Windows Store (see note below). It's free with no strings, no ads, and no in-app purchases. It will be coming very soon for Macs. You can also build a command line version from mfdf on GitHub.

Have you ever copied some photos or videos from a phone or camera SD card to your computer for editing or viewing and found that all the Created dates got overwritten on the copied files? It's very annoying but often happens when copying files across different devices. I suffer from it all the time when trying to edit a mix of copied GoPro, iPhone, Android and drone footage after a trip somewhere.

mfdf fixes that annoyance by going inside each copied file, finding the hidden creation date in metadata, and using that to update the Creation date you see in your file explorer. Just pick a directory in the app and mfdf will update all the common media files dates within, including any subdirectories.

Note: Why the Windows Store? Because if I use the Windows Store store and package the app in the Microsoft secure MSIX packaging format, then MS will certify and publish it for free. Any other format will both cost me a lot of money to get a code signing certificate and also probably pop up scary SmartScreen warnings which no-one wants to deal with.

HTML to RSS

HTML to RSS on GitHub. This is about as niche as it gets. It's for numpties like me who actually enjoy writing HTML by hand but want to automate converting it for use in an RSS feed reader (because doing that by hand would take gold at an Olympic dullness competition). It's a command line application which can read local or remote HTML files, convert the HTML to the RSS format, fix up any broken local image links, and inject it into your RSS.xml file. I use it on by blog pages. If you're thinking "WTF is RSS?" then back away quietly right now.

Man working with tools
An AI-generated man with a hot tool in his hand