bitatatime.com

About this site

bitatatime.com hosts some software utilities written by Matthew Strawbridge for Software Reference Limited. Each tool is initially released as a minimal version for only one pound. Over time, new features will be added and the price will tick upwards.

No-quibble guarantee

All our products come with a no-quibble 28 day money-back guarantee. Download them, try them, and if you're not delighted then we'll give you a full refund. No questions asked!

magidoc

MagiDoc is a minimalistic command-line tool that enables you to convert plain text files to PDF.

It runs on Microsoft Windows and is a single executable with no dependencies, making it ideal for use as part of a software CI build.

Features full Unicode support for special characters; the Microsoft Arial Unicode font is automatically subsetted and embedded in the generated PDF so it can be read successfully across platforms.

Get magidoc v1.0 now for only £1.00

interesting people

Interesting people lets you find interesting people to follow on Twitter. The algorithm is simple but gives good results: we get the list of accounts you follow, and for each of those find the accounts they follow. Then we total them up and show you the most popular results.

In other words, it finds the people that the people you find interesting find interesting!

Interesting people is only available for Microsoft Windows. To run it, follow these steps:

Extract the zip file to the folder of your choice, such as c:\interestingpeople.
Open a command window (e.g. press the Start button, type cmd and press Enter).
In the command window, navigate to the folder where you extracted the zip (e.g. cd c:\interestingpeople).
Type interestingpeople -u=somename -n=100, replacing somename with your twitter account name. (Or just type interestingpeople on its own for a full list of options.)
Your web browser will open. Authenticate interestingpeople with Twitter. (We request only read-only access to your account so we can see who you follow, and we never have access to your password.)
Paste or type the PIN from Twitter into interestingpeople.
Wait while we process your followers. Sorry, but this takes some time (up to one minute for each person you follow) because of Twitter's API rate limits. However, you can leave it running in the background while you get on with other things, and you can even sleep or hybernate your computer and processing will carry on when you wake it up again.
Once processing is complete, you will get a list of suggested accounts to follow.

Version history

v1.0 — initial version
v1.1 — added min and max parameters so you can skip accounts following too few or two many people; some other performance improvements

Get interestingpeople v1.1 now for only £1.10

Upgrade to interestingpeople v1.1 from v1.0 now for only 10p

speechify

Our first product is speechify, a command-line filter for better pronunciation when working with command-line text-to-speech tools (not included). Speechify transliterates difficult words so that the resulting pronunciation is more fluent.

Examples: $ echo Dr. Foster drove to Edinburgh at 100 mph | speechify
Doctor Foster drove to Edinbruh at 100 miles per hour

$ echo Yosemite gold | speechify | some-text-to-speech-tool
(transliterated text is read out loud)

The resultant output is only designed for text-to-speech; it's likely to break your spellings in the interest of better pronunciations (as in Edinbruh in the previous example).

Speechify is available for the following formats (bundled in a single zip file):

✓ Windows (386 and amd64)
✓ Mac OS X/Darwin (386 and amd64)
✓ Linux (386, amd64 and ARM)
✓ FreeBSD (386, amd64 and ARM)
✓ NetBSD (386, amd64 and ARM)
✓ OpenBSD (386 and amd64)