What's New

A natal chart is a drawing of the sky at the moment you were born: where the Sun, the Moon and the planets stood that minute, seen from your city. From it come the Sun sign, the ascendant — the sign rising on the horizon — the twelve houses and the aspects between planets.

We built a natal chart calculator: eleven house systems, tropical and sidereal zodiacs, historical time zones. The astronomy is checked against NASA ephemerides — no more than 8.6 arcseconds apart.

What is exact here is the astronomy, not the interpretation, and we say so plainly. That is why you state how well you know your birth time, and every placement is marked stable, borderline or undetermined.

Years ago I went looking for an IQ test, worked through the whole thing honestly — and at the very end it asked me to pay to see my own score. That was infuriating. Sites still do it.

Our IQ test works the other way round: the score, the percentile, the confidence interval and a profile across six abilities appear on screen straight away, with no payment and no sign-up.

A little of the science. The scale is built so that the average is exactly 100, two thirds of people land between 85 and 115, and about 2% score above 130. The items carry no words — shapes and sequences, in the tradition of Raven's matrices (1938): they are equally fair in any language. And no test gives you a point, only a range, which is why we show a confidence interval next to the score.

I want to say this to whoever is reading right now and holds a Premium account.

Thank you. And I don't say that out of politeness. Yesterday one of you sent us sixteen points — sixteen notes on a tool we had built at his own request. First he asked us to create it. We created it — the mix analyzer. Then he came back and told us what was wrong with it, and how. We did fourteen of the sixteen: two of them contradicted his own earlier requests, and we told him so honestly. Today he is looking at the result.

I will not give you his name. But I want you to understand what happened here: a person for whom that tool is part of the working day went and made it better. Not us. He did.

A week ago, another story. A woman wrote to us about her profession and asked us to add text analysis to speech transcription — to have AI read the transcript itself and write a short summary. We did it. And then we did something she had not asked for: we made the processing roughly thirteen times faster. A four-hour recording used to take an hour — you would start it, go about your day and come back. Now there is almost nothing left to wait for. And the transcription came out more accurate, not less.

None of this is written down anywhere. Not on a single page. Some of you found that door by yourselves.

Well — it is open to all of you. If you work with one of our tools every single day and know it better than we do, write to us: moc.acirbmet@troppus. This is not the limit of what the tool can do. It is the limit of what we have managed to think of so far.

Do not take it for granted. Write to us.

This is Tembrica. Moscow time — 7:02 pm. Here is an announcement about a new tool.

Space Weather answers one question and answers it immediately: is a geomagnetic storm happening right now. Yes or no, in large type, on the first line — and when the next one is due.

Who it is for. Aurora watchers: the map shows where the oval is passing this minute, and whether it reaches your town tonight. Radio amateurs and anyone working HF: solar flares black out the shortwave bands, and here you can see exactly when. Anyone relying on precision satellite positioning — during a storm it drifts further than usual. And anyone who has just read a headline about "the strongest storm in a century" and would like to check for themselves.

About the numbers, briefly. Kp is a scale from zero to nine. The higher it climbs, the stronger the disturbance and the further from the pole the aurora is seen: at five, Scotland and northern Maine; at seven, Ireland, Oregon and Illinois; at nine, Texas and Florida.

The data comes from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. This is an information service: not medical, not aviation, not emergency.

That is the end of the announcement. Stay with us.

— The Tembrica team

My dears, I have one small favour to ask, and I shall not let it go until I have asked it.

Most of you find us by accident: you needed to trim a song, you dropped in, you got it done, you closed the tab. And a month later — "where was that site that had all of it?" And you will not find it again, will you. So here it is: we can be saved as an app. One button, and an icon appears on your desktop or on your phone's home screen, just like any other app. And then you will not lose us again.

On an iPhone it goes through Share → Add to Home Screen, and the button itself will walk you through the steps. On a computer, in Chrome or Edge, look for the install icon at the right-hand end of the address bar.

And a lovely little bonus: after that, some of the tools keep working even without internet. On a plane, on the underground, at a cottage where you only get a signal if you stand on a stool — a few things will open anyway.

And now the news I started this whole conversation for. We are already past 630 tools, and by the end of the month we want to reach 700. That is twenty-three and a half days and an awful lot of work. So the icon will come in handy soon — there will be plenty of reasons to drop by.

Install it now, would you? Before you forget. It takes two seconds. 💛

We made the Ikigai Test. And I will say it honestly — it is the best purpose test you have seen. Others draw four circles copied off the internet and call it a test — weak!

What is ikigai? A Japanese notion with centuries of history: «that which makes life worth living». It is named among the secrets of Okinawa's long-livers, and science has studied it seriously since the 1960s — the idea has passed the test of both time and research. One legend we will not sell you: the famous four-circle chart is no ancient scroll — it was drawn in the West in our own day. Truth is dearer than a pretty tale, so the method is laid out honestly, and the feeling of a full life is measured by the only open, validated scale — Ikigai-9.

Why take it? Because the question «am I doing the right thing with my life?» drains more strength than any work does. In seven minutes the test shows where you stand: a map of four directions — what you love, what you are good at, what people need, and what pays — plus your archetype, with every number explained in plain words. You get a working answer, not a label: which side of yours is strong, what is missing, and the three questions to start with so your work both delights and provides. And in the Workshop the map of meaning is built by your own hands, from your own pursuits — you will see which of them sits closest to your ikigai.

Forty-one questions — a tremendous result. Take it — and judge for yourselves!

— The Tembrica team

One brief: introduce the site, using the site's own tools. The voice is synthetic, the footage is real.

What does what:

• Screen capture Screen Recorder
• Voice Text to speech
• Music Background music
• Mixing Audio mixer
• Mastering Music mastering
• Sound on video Audio in video
• Subtitles Auto captions
• Editing Video trim

So your own AI can do the same, we opened an API. The key lives in Settings → API: hand it to your model and ask. For example: “make a video about the Tembrica site with a synthesised voice-over.”

The API launched today, and not every tool is available to an AI yet. If something does not work — write to us.

— The Tembrica team

Look up what a mastered track costs on any freelance marketplace. Then look up transcription, priced per audio minute. Those are not our numbers — they are other people’s rate cards, and anyone can check them in a minute.

Orders like these sit on job boards every day. Somebody takes them.

With a Premium account, mastering runs in batches of up to a hundred files and comes back as a single archive. Transcription of a recording up to four hours long goes to our server — you can close the tab and start on the next job.

The rights to the result are yours; that is written into our Terms.

Two things worth knowing before the first order. Someone else’s recording is transcribed with the consent of the people speaking on it. Someone else’s track is mastered when the client holds the rights.

We promise no income: you find the client, you agree the terms, you deliver, and you check the result before handing it over. We are only the tool in the middle of that chain.

If you are not doing this yet — somebody else is.

— The Tembrica team

There is something about this project worth saying out loud.

We release a tool when it is 95% done. Not 100. The remaining 5% is what cannot be seen from the inside: a format nobody here thought of; a button that is not where people look for it; a file that opens for everyone except you. That five percent comes from you.

It has worked this way from the start — nine months. There are two of us, no office, no investors; everything that comes in from Premium accounts goes straight back into the tools. At this size, the only way to do it well is not to do it alone.

What you can do right now, if you feel like helping:

Something broke? Write to us — what you were doing, which file, what happened. Three lines save us half a day and save you the wait.

Something irritating? That is a bug too. «It works, but it drives me mad» is the most valuable report there is, and the rarest.

Missing a tool? Describe the task, not the solution. «Every week I need to turn these files into those» is far more useful than «build a converter».

Using something similar elsewhere? Tell us what it fails to do for you. We are not competing — we are looking for the gaps nobody has closed.

Want to test things early? Write «I want to test». We owe our volunteers a good half of the fixes, and newcomers are always welcome.

moc.acirbmet@troppus

And thank you to everyone already doing this. There are not two of us — there are many of you, and you built this place together with us.

Where to start if you want to try something right now. We have just opened the animated avatar maker: it turns a photo or a short video into a living avatar or a sticker — boomerang loop, circular mask, rotating ring, transparent background, presets for Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp and Slack. It is brand new, which means you are looking at exactly those 95%. Try it on your own photo and tell us where it trips: that will be the remaining five.

— The Tembrica team

Most of us keep a small pile of converters bookmarked: one for images, one for video, and a third one that's "the good one for PDFs". We tried to make a single tool enough.

The Universal File Converter looks inside the file rather than at its extension. If something is called photo.jpg but is really a WebP, the tool says so out loud and converts what is actually there.

It takes audio, video, images (HEIC and TIFF included), PDFs, Word, EPUB, FB2, PowerPoint, Excel and OpenDocument files, archives, subtitles, data tables and fonts. It also crosses between categories: pull the audio out of a video, grab a still frame from it, make a PDF out of a photo, turn a PDF back into Word. Mixed batches are welcome — drop a photo, a clip and a spreadsheet together, give each its own target and take everything away in one archive. Most conversions run right in your browser.

Our ambitions are modest: replace every converter on the internet. Within reason, of course — turning Monday into Friday is still beyond us.

The tool is new, so here is our ask: try it on your own files and see where it trips. If a format you need is missing, the page has a "Missing a format?" form — that queue is exactly how we decide what to add next.

— The Tembrica team

A familiar situation: the presentation for tomorrow's lesson is on the school computer and you need it on your phone. Or the other way round — you photographed the children's work and now the pictures have to go into a document on the computer. And then it turns out the USB stick is at home, the school Wi-Fi will not let a personal phone in, the cable is the wrong one, and signing into your own mail on somebody else's computer is something you would rather not do — and rightly so.

We are opening QR file transfer. It needs none of that: it shows your file on the screen, and you simply film that screen with the other device's camera. No cables, no internet, nothing to install, no passwords.

How can that possibly work. You have surely seen a QR code — the little black-and-white square you point a camera at in a café or a station. It is not a picture, it is packed-up text, and about a page of it fits into one square. Now imagine there is not one square but twenty or thirty per second. The screen flickers, the camera watches, and the file flows from one device to the other straight through the air. On light. As if you were holding up page after page while a colleague photographed them — only thirty pages a second.

And if your hand shakes? Nothing bad happens, and this is the loveliest part of how it is built. The program does not care which frames you caught — only how many. Miss one and you will catch it on the next lap, as if a poem were being dictated to you over and over. It simply takes a little longer. At the end it checks by itself that the file came through whole, and tells you plainly whether it did.

You need two devices: one with a screen, one with a camera. Nothing else. One thing worth saying plainly: the device that RECEIVES is the one with the camera. Computer to phone always works — every computer has a screen. Receiving on a computer works only if it has a camera: laptops have one built in, but a desktop with no camera cannot receive a file this way. A document or a spreadsheet takes a few seconds, a photograph half a minute, a presentation with pictures a minute or two — and during that time both devices are best put down and left alone. A film is not what this is for. You can also send plain text — a Wi-Fi password, a link, a number: on the second device it arrives with a Copy button already waiting.

And a request. It works for us. But "us" means our screens and our cameras, and everyone's are different: one screen is dimmer, one camera simpler. Try it on two of your own devices and write in the comments whether it worked. Especially write if it did not: there is a switch that makes the picture larger and easier for the camera — turn it down a step and tell us whether that helped. That is exactly what we cannot find out about your devices on our own.

Every big story starts with a small catastrophe. Ours started with a letter: "Please help — the recording of my mom's voice won't open. It's the only one I have." Back then we didn't know there would be hundreds of letters like it.

That's how Repair Audio was born. Then came the people whose videos wouldn't open — and Repair Video appeared. Then the photos, and we built Photo Repair. Today these tools are used every single day, and every repaired file is somebody's memory brought back.

But these aren't the only files that break. Archives, documents, presentations — every format has its own way of dying. So our plan for the coming week is simple: learn to bring those back to life too. If something of yours won't open — don't delete it. Soon there will be a place for it on Tembrica.

— The Tembrica team

In family albums the dearest faces are often the blurriest: a tiny print, a shaky camera, decades in the sun. You scan it — and the eyes are barely there, just pale smudges. We're launching Old Photo Restoration: a neural network finds every face in the picture and brings back its features — eyes, teeth, contours — right in your browser.

Before After

Before After

Drag the handle — both pairs are genuine: archival Lewis Hine photographs (1910–1911), faces restored by the neural network.

Each face is restored on its own and carefully blended back in: the background, composition and tone of the shot stay untouched — sepia stays sepia, black-and-white stays black-and-white. A live slider adjusts the restoration strength even after processing, a face that didn't come out right can be switched off with one click, and the change map honestly shows where the AI touched the pixels and where it didn't. The tool deliberately skips faces that are too small: at that size a neural network no longer restores — it makes things up, and it's more honest to leave them alone. And if there are no faces in the picture at all, the tool applies an overall enhancement to the whole frame — with a fourfold upscale.

The examples above come straight from the tool's page: it has the same slider and two archival photos with the result already computed. Try those first — you won't need a photo of your own.

Sound engineers know this particular kind of search: you need a door creak — not just any creak, but that one, heavy, cellar-deep — and you are on the fortieth file, no longer sure how it differs from the first. Now a sound is not something you look for. It is something you describe.

We built a tool that makes sounds out of descriptions. You type “a hedgehog snuffling”, “a bartender wiping a glass”, “a car alarm at four in the morning” — in English, in your own language — and you get a sound. Not speech: it cannot pronounce words, its nature is a different one, it is about rustle and impact, about rain and creak, about what lies between words. It runs on tokens. You can download it as MP3, or as lossless WAV — 48 kilohertz, the way an editing suite expects it.

Use it in your own work: video, games, apps, podcasts, advertising.

Short effects run up to twenty-two seconds and can loop without a click — for backgrounds and game loops; long atmospheres run up to three minutes. Whatever comes out stays in your library, so you are not digging through folders later.

About the terms — plainly, no fine print. You may use the sounds in your own work, including commercially and with no time limit. You may not sell or distribute the sounds on their own — as packs, libraries or stock collections; only inside a finished work. There is no exclusivity: the same prompt from someone else will give a similar sound.

Seven examples with players are waiting on the tool page. A rooster, a thunderstorm, crying, a hedgehog, the bartender with his glass, a car alarm, a cat. It is easier to listen once: Sound Effects Generator.

Tools that studios used to pay for should today be within everyone's reach. A person with a phone and an idea shouldn't have to yield to a person with a budget. That is what we work for: hundreds of tools, and a new one almost every day.

But useful things have no loud voice. Places like ours are heard of last — the one heard first is not the one who is needed most, but the one who paid most to be heard.

You have what we cannot buy: a voice people trust. One sentence from you — «this is what I actually use» — weighs more than a month of advertising. Help us be heard, and we will thank you with what we have.

You — tell your people about us. In your own words. Honestly.
We — give you a Premium account for six months: higher daily limits across all tools, server-side processing of long recordings, priority on heavy jobs, exports at maximum quality, no ads and no watermark on video. Plus everything new that ships during those six months.

Who this is for. Our benchmark is 10,000 followers or a comparable audience: viewers, listeners, community members. If yours is noticeably smaller we will most likely say no — and we would rather not waste your time. One exception: a narrow professional audience — sound engineers, teachers, 3D-printing makers. There we look at the topic, not the counter.

We will not tell you what to say. We will not send you ad copy and we will not ask you to praise us. Say it in your own words and honestly: if you did not like a tool or something is missing, say so. That is more useful to us than praise.

Where to write. moc.acirbmet@troppus, with «Blogger» in the subject line. Attach links to your platforms and a couple of words about which of our tools you use. We read every message ourselves, so a reply may take a few days.

And if you do not have a large audience — just show the site to one person who would find it useful. Everything starts with one person.

— The Tembrica team