What's New

Financial literacy starts with a simple question: what is my money worth today? A thousand ten years ago and a thousand now buy different things — and it helps to know how different.

We have updated the inflation calculator. It now has:

• 44 countries, from official statistics;
• two countries on one chart, and a ranking of all countries for the period you pick;
• an answer to “what if my savings had been in dollars or in gold?”;
• your own inflation from your own basket of spending.

For example, since January 2000 prices have risen 17% in Japan and Switzerland, 67% in Germany and nearly doubled in the US. Several-fold differences within one generation — and the chart shows them in a second.

It helps when choosing a deposit, asking for a raise or planning a big purchase. Try your own amount — it takes a minute.

One of our users is blind. He asked us to make games that can be played by voice, through a voice assistant. We took it on: over the next three weeks we’ll build such games, and maybe useful tools for people who are blind or have low vision.

We won’t charge blind people for them. Almost no one makes games like these, precisely because they don’t pay for themselves.

So here is our request to everyone who can: from October 1 to 7, buy tokens or Premium. The tokens stay in your account, Premium starts working right away, and all the money from purchases this week will go toward building games and tools for blind people.

When everything is ready, we’ll tell you about it in our news.

Send your ideas to moc.acirbmet@troppus. Write to us if you have health problems or other difficulties a tool could help with. We build tools for everyone. Not always fast, but we build them.

We don’t write about every new tool: many of them aren’t for everyone, and the people who need them find them. But so you can see that the work goes on and we keep moving toward our goals, here are some of the tools that appeared over the past week.

Video Editor With A Timeline — clips, photos, transitions, titles, music and a logo in one video.

Dash Cam — your phone records the road in a loop, saves the footage on impact by itself and puts your speed in the frame.

Bingo & Lotto Caller — numbers called out loud, a board for the TV and printable cards.

Backgammon Online — backgammon and long nardy: against the computer, two players on one screen or with a friend by link.

Digital Music Stand — for musicians: sheet music on a tablet, pages turned with a pedal, a head turn or a wink.

Film Negative Scanner — point your phone camera at old film and see a regular color photo you can save.

Online Camera — self-timer, burst, photo booth and manual settings for a webcam or phone.

Algebra test — shows a student in grades 5–11 a map of topics: what they’ve mastered and where the gaps are.

Eye Contact — if you read a script from the screen in a video, your eyes will look into the lens.

Mashup Maker — the vocals of one song over the music of another; tempo and key are matched automatically.

Phonetic Spelling — how a word, phrase or song is read aloud, with stress and audio.

You’ll find the rest in the site search: describe your task in your own words.

Few people know this, but a few days ago the site was hit by a sudden wave of visitors: almost 300,000 visits in just three days.

That’s a huge load for a website. And in all that time the site didn’t freeze for a single minute and didn’t let anyone down. The rush is over now, and without this post most people would never have known.

For us it was a real stress test, and it looks like we passed. Now we know we’re ready for a big influx of visitors — and we have room to grow.

A reminder: the best features come with a Premium account.

On September 22, someone wrote to us: "A virtual electric guitar — a real one, for rock, with a choice of genres." No email was left, so we are answering here. If that was you, thank you — the instrument is ready: electric guitar online.

We did not stitch together recorded sounds. The strings are calculated by a physical model, and its sound was checked against recordings of real guitars: tuning, decay, the slight rise in pitch after a pluck. Then the signal travels the way it does in a real rig: pedals, a tube amp, a cabinet.

Just starting out? Pick a genre, play with the chord buttons or your keyboard, and turn on a band with drums and bass. Been playing for years? Change the tuning and capo, connect MIDI or your own guitar through an audio interface, record a take and download it as WAV, MP3 or MIDI.

19 rock genres and a clean tone, from classic rock to metal. Tell us what is missing: we read every request.

A new tool: AI Sound Effects for Video. Upload a clip without sound, and the AI looks at the frames and creates audio that matches the action: footsteps, splashes, a bouncing ball, street noise, a school bell.

Who it’s for: anyone making videos with AI, since those clips often come out silent; anyone whose recording lost its sound to the wind or never had any; timelapses, drone footage, animation and video reports where silence feels awkward.

The tool splits the clip into scenes on its own and writes what each one should sound like — you can edit the description in your own words. Don’t like the sound in one scene? Redo just that scene. You can add background music, or keep the clip’s own audio and turn it down. Listen right along with the video and download the finished MP4.

The page has before-and-after examples made from real clips.

Suno v6 is out — and from today every song in the AI Song Generator, the AI Music Generator and Song in Your Own Voice is made on it.

What changed. v6 is Suno's new flagship: according to its makers it follows the style more precisely, blends vocals and instruments more cleanly and holds quality across the whole track. It was trained on licensed catalogues from Warner Music, BMG and Believe — real recordings, not whatever could be scraped.

There is a choice now. Next to the standard v6 the model list offers v6 Wild: less predictable, with bolder, more textured results. A gamble by design — sometimes better than you asked for, sometimes nothing like it. Same charge.

Old tracks stay as they are: the caption under each still names the version that made it. The voice from “Song in Your Own Voice” sings on v6 too, no need to record it again.

If you still have tokens, this is the moment to compare with your earlier generations.

We built a tool against room boom in voice recordings.

Who it is for: audiobooks, podcasts, voice-over, lessons — anything recorded at home, in a closet or in a tight booth.

What it solves:

— «The voice sounds like a barrel». The tool finds the resonances in the pauses between phrases and shortens the ring instead of cutting a whole band out.
— «Noise reduction left an echo». That is exactly what happens: steady noise was masking the room, and a gate chops the ring off a fraction of a second after each word. Here the ring goes away without those cut-offs.
— «I remove the boom and lose the voice». An EQ cut at 200 Hz takes the pitch of the voice with it — for a woman reading aloud it sits right there. The tool removes only the excess and never takes the low end below the norm for a voice of that pitch.

There is a reference mode: load a chapter of yours that sounds right, and the low end of a boomy recording is matched to it. The narrator whose letter started all this had a chapter she had rejected because of the boom. After matching it to her own good chapter, the two differ by less than one and a half decibels.

We have opened a room where Premium members talk to each other. It looks roughly like this:

— Has anyone made vertical covers in the editor? I cannot keep the text centred.
— Use the guides. Let me send you a screenshot.
— I actually build mine in a different tool, it comes out faster. Want me to show you?

This is not support and not a feedback form. It is a conversation between people who use the same tools you do: they share tricks, show what came out, argue about ideas.

A good thought from the conversation can become an idea — others back it with votes and it gets a status. That is how you see what actually made it from words into work.

Who it is for: Premium members with a confirmed email.
Where: “Profile → Community” or on this page.

It will be quiet there at first, and that is fine. Communities grow over years, and right now we are laying the foundation.

Tell us what you are into. We genuinely want to know.

Maybe you are learning Korean. Or you sat down to chess and the computer still beats you. You knit, you embroider, you keep a garden, you are getting ready for the long winter evenings. Or someone you know is deep in a hobby and you would like to try it too — you just cannot see where to start.

We can build a tool for that. Or a course. Or a test that checks what you have learned. Or invent, together with you, something that exists nowhere yet.

If you have children and want their time to go into something worthwhile, we will make a place where they can try things and build things. Learn a 3D printer. Come back to a dream there were never hours for.

Our goal is 4500 tools. The plan for the coming months is already written, but it is nearly all about work — and we would like part of it to be about the soul.

Write to us here. And if a tool already exists but is not made the way you need, or something is missing from it, write to the same place: we keep improving them.

Let us say it up front, so you do not have to keep it in mind: we have no subscription. Premium is bought for a term — three months, six months or a year. When the term ends, the account simply becomes an ordinary one: everything you made stays where it is, only the raised limits switch off. There is nowhere to go and nothing to cancel.

Money leaves only by your decision: we never charge anything ourselves — we do not hold your card details. The payment is taken by Polar, with whom we have a signed agreement: they see the number, and all that reaches us is a message that the payment went through. We know how uneasy it feels to type a card into a website, and we tried to leave fewer reasons to worry.

If you decide to renew, it is 20% cheaper, and the discount is counted from the price in force at that moment. Prices do rise sometimes: what everything runs on gets dearer too, and what we earn goes back into the work.

That is how it is with us today. Nobody has asked us for automatic renewal yet — ask, and we will think about it. Whatever changes later, it will not touch a term already paid for.

Forgive us for raising this. The day comes anyway — better today, over a cup of tea.

Almost everything lives in the phone: photos of the grandchildren, letters, bills, subscriptions quietly taking money. If someone dies and nobody knows the passwords, the family stands at a closed door. Money in a bank turns up eventually. Photos do not.

We made Digital Will — go through it in an evening. It reminds you what to write down: where money and papers are, who takes the cat, which photos matter. It starts easy: Google and Apple let you name a person in advance, and they hand everything over. Two minutes, and half is done. Few know this: Telegram deletes an account on its own if you stop signing in, with all the messages. You cannot switch it off, but you can set a longer term.

Passwords are written separately and locked. The key is split into slips you give your family: one alone is useless, together they open it. Other sites ask you to hand your passwords to them. We do not. You can check right here that it opens. And if our site is gone one day, they open it without us — we wrote inside how.

Please do it while things are calm. If anything reads unclearly, say so in the comments.

Almost every burnout test hands back one number. That number is useless: someone worn out by life and someone worn out by their job get the same score, and what they should do is opposite.

The burnout test scores three scales apart: exhaustion in general, from work, and from dealing with people. It names which one leads, and the advice starts there — with work-related exhaustion a holiday treats the symptom, not the cause; with personal exhaustion a new employer usually changes nothing.

Plus two questions the questionnaire itself never asks: how long this has lasted, and whether rest still restores you. Without them a high score cannot tell burnout from a brutal week — and ICD-11 defines burnout exactly that way: chronic, and not successfully managed. Those answers move no score; they change the conclusion.

Built on the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory, an open instrument with published norms. It is not a diagnosis.

Every EQ test online works the same way: it asks how well you read people and hands your own answer back. That measures self-image, not skill.

Our EQ test is built differently. It has items with correct answers — real voices and faces from 91 actors. The difficulty of each clip was not assigned by us but measured: 2 443 people made 219 688 judgements on them, and your percentile is your rank among them.

The headline is not the score. It is the distance between how skilled you think you are and how you actually decide. If that gap is smaller than the margin of error, we say so: no finding.

Why now: half of our talking has moved to calls and text, where the face is gone and the voice is compressed. The test scores voice and face apart and shows which channel is your weaker one.

The explained breakdown of your mistakes runs on tokens. The test and the result stay open.

Folks keep saying these neural nets will knock the creativity clean out of a person. Not a bit of it. A man who has held a fiddle does not put it down — and nobody was ever sorry for a helping hand.

Here is how it goes. A genie out of a bottle does not live your life for you; he does what he is asked. Ask any old how and you get any old what. But say it plain — my gran is turning eighty, she has baked pies her whole life, she calls the cat Barsik — and out comes a poem about her, not about some gran in general.

So we have gone and made a poem generator.

Quatrains if you like, or a sonnet, or an acrostic with the first letters spelling out a name. Pick the metre and the rhyme scheme, or leave them be. Third line not to your taste — that one line gets written again and the rest stays put.

Who do folks write poems for? Not for themselves, that is certain. A friend’s birthday, the old folk’s anniversary, your wife on the fourteenth of February, the teacher in the class chat so she knows she is remembered. Sometimes it comes from the heart, sometimes from plain laziness. Both are honest enough in their way.

For Russian we go one step further and check the result against a stress dictionary: syllables counted line by line, stressed positions found, rhyming pairs compared. In the other languages the poem is written to the form you asked for.

It does not come free: poems run on tokens, and tokens are sold here too.

And if you look at it and say «dull as ditchwater» — say straight out what is missing. We will fix it. We are not proud.