Feels like magic

Disposable inbox that self-destructs after ten minutes. Exactly what you want when a download demands an email address first.

Fly out through a mapped model of our stellar neighbourhood until the Sun is one unremarkable dot among thousands.

The Myers-Briggs-flavoured test everybody has taken, with a four-letter verdict and profile pages that are unnervingly specific.

The original tile-merging game, written in a weekend and responsible for an enormous amount of lost 2014.

Grant Sanderson's maths lessons, plus the written versions of the animations that made linear algebra look like geometry.

Seventy statements, four political axes and an ideology label at the end. The open-source template for a hundred imitators.

Windows 98 rebuilt in JavaScript, right down to the window chrome and the sound the error dialogs make.

Starts as one button beside a dying fire and quietly becomes something much larger. Best played without reading anything about it first.

Hand-picked, highly rated films that were never blockbusters, filterable by mood and by where you can currently stream them.

Unfiltered aircraft tracking, including the private jets and military flights that the commercial trackers politely agree to hide.

Waterhole cameras in southern African reserves, running since the nineties, where nothing happens for an hour and then everything does.

Live flight tracking with airport arrival boards and playback of earlier flights, formerly known as RadarBox and still free to browse.

The lab page of the psychologist whose completely static images refuse to stop rotating, added to for over twenty years.

Games built here rather than embedded from elsewhere — no ads inside the frame and no third party watching you play.

Upload a child's drawing of a person and it finds the limbs, rigs them and makes the figure dance. Research that turned out purely delightful.

Every knot worth knowing, animated frame by frame so you can scrub back and forth until your hands finally get it.

Recommendation-led catalogue with if-you-liked-this chains going back to 2001, plus legal streaming links for each title.

Every opening and ending sequence in decent quality, searchable by series or by song. A dangerous tab to open at work.

The prestige-layer masterpiece: reset everything for a multiplier, then reset the resets, until the numbers stop having names.

Gianni Sarcone's workshop of puzzles and illusions, half optical trickery and half mathematical recreation, running since the 1990s.

Takes a permanent snapshot of a page on demand, including ones the Wayback Machine will not capture. Useful when a page is about to change.

Botanical infinite zoom drifting through flowers, insects and quiet ruins. Best left running on a second screen.

A survivor of the Flash era that converted its best strategy and adventure titles rather than letting them quietly die.

Draws boxes, arrows and flowcharts entirely out of monospace characters, for diagrams that live inside code comments.

Recorded terminal sessions replayed as selectable text, genuinely useful to learn from and indistinguishable from real work.

Drop an asteroid of your chosen size on any address and read back the fireball, wind speed and earthquake radius it makes.

Streams clips uploaded straight from phones with default filenames and no audience, drifting past like a broadcast from nobody.

Draw a wonky shape and it offers professional illustrations of what it thinks you meant. Ruthlessly effective on anyone who cannot draw.

A straightforward cartoon portrait builder with vector output, useful for when a real profile photo is genuinely not an option.

One song revealed a single instrument at a time, six guesses, one puzzle a day. Needs headphones and a decent musical memory.

Minimalist colour puzzle rooms — yellow, blue, red — where every level teaches you a rule the game never states out loud.

Engineering essays with live diagrams you drag — gears, lenses, GPS, sound — each the clearest thing ever written on its subject.

Chiptune tracker with a whole song's worth of channels, shareable as a URL that contains the entire tune inside it.

A company worth hundreds of billions serves a homepage of plain blue links, unchanged since the 1990s and quietly proud of it.

Annual contest in which vision scientists compete to fool you, with every finalist since 2005 still watchable.

A countdown big enough to read from the back of the room, which is the only real requirement a workshop timer has.

Cyberpunk progression game where the way forward is writing real JavaScript to automate your own hacking. Learning it is the game.

Anonymous celebrity riddles where readers do the detective work in the comments and are occasionally proved right.

The volunteer lightning detection network behind most live strike maps, with raw data and instructions for building your own receiver.

Drag four blobs up and down and they sing genuine four-part harmony, trained on real opera singers, always in key.

Sculpt a glossy blob with sliders for noise, light and iridescence, then leave it rotating and admire your handiwork.

Several hundred properly licensed board games with the rules enforced for you, so nobody argues about whether that move was legal.

Ben Eater's flocking simulation with the three rules exposed as sliders, so you can break the flock deliberately.

A blog that has been finding the best browser escape and point-and-click games every week since 2005, and is still posting.

The screensaver logo in full screen, with a counter for how many times it has hit the corner while you waited.

Code-breaking tools and a cipher identifier for when you have a string of nonsense and no idea what it is.

Plain, well-sorted illusion collection with the explanation directly underneath each one, from café walls to impossible triangles.

A German board game world that has hosted Carcassonne and Puerto Rico since 2001, complete with a slightly baffling lobby.