@acarbonbasedlifeform - Tumblr Blog

Just a bunch of Useful websites - Updated for 2023

Removed/checked all links to make sure everything is working (03/03/23). Hope they help!

Sejda - Free online PDF editor.

Supercook - Have ingredients but no idea what to make? Put them in here and it'll give you recipe ideas.

Still Tasty - Trying the above but unsure about whether that sauce in the fridge is still edible? Check here first.

Archive.ph - Paywall bypass. Like 12ft below but appears to work far better and across more sites in my testing. I'd recommend trying this one first as I had more success with it.

12ft – Hate paywalls? Try this site out.

Where Is This - Want to know where a picture was taken, this site can help.

TOS/DR - Terms of service, didn't read. Gives you a summary of terms of service plus gives each site a privacy rating.

OneLook - Reverse dictionary for when you know the description of the word but can't for the life of you remember the actual word.

My Abandonware - Brilliant site for free, legal games. Has games from 1978 up to present day across pc and console. You'll be surprised by some of the games on there, some absolute gems.

Project Gutenberg – Always ends up on these type of lists and for very good reason. All works that are copyright free in one place.

Ninite – New PC? Install all of your programs in one go with no bloat or unnecessary crap.

PatchMyPC - Alternative to ninite with over 300 app options to keep upto date. Free for home users.

Unchecky – Tired of software trying to install additional unwanted programs? This will stop it completely by unchecking the necessary boxes when you install.

Sci-Hub – Research papers galore! Check here before shelling out money. And if it’s not here, try the next link in our list.

LibGen – Lots of free PDFs relate primarily to the sciences.

Zotero – A free and easy to use program to collect, organize, cite and share research.

Car Complaints – Buying a used car? Check out what other owners of the same model have to say about it first.

CamelCamelCamel – Check the historical prices of items on Amazon and set alerts for when prices drop.

Have I Been Pawned – Still the king when it comes to checking if your online accounts have been released in a data breach. Also able to sign up for email alerts if you’ve ever a victim of a breach.

I Have No TV - A collection of documentaries for you to while away the time. Completely free.

Radio Garden – Think Google Earth but wherever you zoom, you get the radio station of that place.

Just The Recipe – Paste in the url and get just the recipe as a result. No life story or adverts.

Tineye – An Amazing reverse image search tool.

My 90s TV – Simulates 90’s TV using YouTube videos. Also has My80sTV, My70sTV, My60sTV and for the younger ones out there, My00sTV. Lose yourself in nostalgia.

Foto Forensics – Free image analysis tools.

Old Games Download – A repository of games from the 90’s and early 2000’s. Get your fix of nostalgia here.

Online OCR – Convert pictures of text into actual text and output it in the format you need.

Remove Background – An amazingly quick and accurate way to remove backgrounds from your pictures.

Twoseven – Allows you to sync videos from providers such as Netflix, Youtube, Disney+ etc and watch them with your friends. Ad free and also has the ability to do real time video and text chat.

Coolors – Struggling to get a good combination of colors? This site will generate color palettes for you.

This To That – Need to glue two things together? This’ll help.

Photopea – A free online alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Does everything in your browser.

BitWarden – Free open source password manager.

Just Beam It - Peer to peer file transfer. Drop the file in on one end, click create link and send to whoever. Leave your pc on that page while they download. Because of how it works there are no file limits. It's genuinely amazing. Best file transfer system I have ever used.

Atlas Obscura – Travelling to a new place? Find out the hidden treasures you should go to with Atlas Obscura.

ID Ransomware – Ever get ransomware on your computer? Use this to see if the virus infecting your pc has been cracked yet or not. Potentially saving you money. You can also sign up for email notifications if your particular problem hasn’t been cracked yet.

Way Back Machine – The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites and loads more.

Rome2Rio – Directions from anywhere to anywhere by bus, train, plane, car and ferry.

Splitter – Seperate different audio tracks audio. Allowing you to split out music from the words for example.

myNoise – Gives you beautiful noises to match your mood. Increase your productivity, calm down and need help sleeping? All here for you.

DeepL – Best language translation tool on the web.

Forvo – Alternatively, if you need to hear a local speaking a word, this is the site for you.

For even more useful sites, there is an expanded list that can be found here.

hussyknee

The main Lib Gen site (the .li and .rs domains) seems to have been taken down for good, but the mirrors .bz, .la, .vg, and .gk still work. The beautiful site functionality and interface of the original is gone forever though. It's a lot harder to filter results on the mirror sites, and more risk of spam links and malware.

Anna's Archive is the largest repository of free document downloads on the web, that links to libgen, zlib, sci-hub and other shadow libraries. If you can't find your book or paper on AA, chances are slim it'll be anywhere else. A lot of their old domains got taken down last year but .gl .vg, .pk, and .gd still works. If you can't access any of those URLs, it's probably because your ISP is blocking it. In which case, here's a handy guide to changing your DNS yourself.

And finally zlibrary. It has the best interface, almost no risk of malware, most limited downloads, and most likely to have individual downloads taken down by publisher DCMAs. It's also the one with the most scam sites, so please refer to the guide in the Reddit community. They have an app, which is the most sure way to access the site without link hopping every time the Feds try to play whack-a-mole with the domains, but it takes about 14 dog years to load. This link has never failed me though.

You can check the URL health of all these sites and their mirrors through SLUM.

iamjapanese

Christine Ödlund （Swedish, b. 1963）

from the series "Polyphonic Soundscape" 1. I, 2021 / watercolour, plant pigments and pencil on paper / 43 × 35.5 cm 2. IV, 2021 / watercolour, plant pigments and pencil on paper / 43 × 35.5 cm 3.VI, 2021 / watercolour, plant pigments, ink and pencil on paper / 73.5 × 54.5 cm via more

socialistexan

vitabreva

themummersfolly

How dare you leave this in the tags.

MonoKubo

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.

And the world didn’t know her name.

clevermanka

She was admitted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2025 but refused, fuck yeah, Carol. Her official website is incredible.

#music #history

ymutate

Vladimir Nikolaevich Fedorovich

(Russian, 1871–1928)

"Calm Waters", 1910.

Oil on Canvas, 197 × 115 cm. (77.6 × 45.3 in.)

Private Collection.

withdreamsofhereafter

Hexagonal growth in a black olive tree

burningmine-deactivated20230217

Tiny Landscapes, Olympic National Park

woodsdyke

long-tailed duck. you agree

#art

by-pr0xy

Everything i know about sea slugs:

Sea slugs referes to several groups:

Nudibranch ("typical" sea slugs i guess)

Sarcoglossans (sap suckers)

Thecosomata (Sea butterflies)

Gymnosomata (Sea angels)

Aplysiomorpha (sea hares)

Cephalaspedia (headshield slugs, bubble snails)

Sea cucumbers are sometimes referred to as sea slugs but they aren't gastrapods, they are in the same family as starfish.

Nudibranch are what you most likely think of as sea slugs. Theres about 3000 species. They are usually catagoriesed as either dorids or aeolids. Aeolids have several cerata (finger-like things along their back) which they use for respiration and self defence. Dorids have a branchial plume around their anus that they use to breath.

Dorids also have mantels which are like a foot that extends past its body, whilst aeolids dont. Also, aeolids can perform kleptocnidy, where they take the stinging cells from their food and use them for their own defence.

Left: aeolid (opalescent nudibranch)

Right: dorid (willans chromodoris)

Nudibranch are carnivores, primarily feeding on sponges, corals, hydroids, bryozoans, sea anemones, and sometimes other nudibranch!

They often steal pigments, toxins, or stinging cells from their food for camouflage and self defence.

Most sarcoglossans are herbivores, feeding on algea and sea weed, and most species "specialise" in a specific type or genus. They are often know as sap sucking sea slugs because they use their radula* to pierce the cells of its food and suck out the contents. There are 284 known species.

Soem sarcoglossans can keep the chloroplasts and use them for photosynthesis (this is called kleptoplasty)

Sarcoglossans are distinct from other similar groups because they only ahve one row of teeth on their radula* whilst other groups have multiple.

Photosynthetic species usually have either cerata or "wings" as these have the most surface area for the most amount of photosynthesis, for example, the eastern emerald elysia:

*Radula are kinda like tounges but with rows of teeth that most sea slugs have. They use it to scrape food such as sponges off of rocks.

Some species dont ahve radulas, such as the hooded nudibranch, which has a hood with samll tenticals which it uses like a net to catch food hooded nudibranch ⬇️

Rinophores are like antennas. Sea slugs use them to "smell" chemical changes in the water which indicate food sources or mates. They also help them sense distance and changes in water current. These abilities help sea slugs stay and mate near their food source. Theres lots of different types/shapes of rinophore but i dont know much about them. Examples: