Feels like magic

Start with one enormous dot; every pass of the cursor splits it into four, until the pixels resolve into a picture.

Jason Kottke has been posting the interesting bits of the web since 1998, with no algorithm involved at any point.

Gossip written as media criticism, tracking how celebrity stories get placed and who stands to benefit from the placing.

Free audio courses that teach by making you work out the grammar yourself, made by one person with no adverts.

Ableton's free course on beats, basslines and song structure, taught by handing you the instruments inside the page.

Enter your birthday and watch a live tally of the heartbeats, blinks and steps you have got through so far.

Every lightning strike detected worldwide appears within seconds of the flash, triangulated by a volunteer network of home-built receivers.

Travel outwards at light speed while hearing which radio hits have reached each distance, oldest at the far edge.

Draw a track and watch a sledder ride it, a physics toy people have spent years turning into hand-drawn music videos.

Hundreds of small text translators — pirate, medieval, wingdings, uwu — plus a builder for making your own.

Wikipedia's running audit of the things almost everyone believes and almost nobody has ever checked.

Every Wikipedia edit as it happens, rendered as bells and strings, with each new user announced by a whisper.

Start with four elements and work towards seven hundred, most of which are jokes you only understand on arrival.

Fakes a phone's live activity banner — a food delivery, a match score, a boarding pass — for screenshots and mockups.

Live air traffic control audio from towers around the world, so you can listen to a controller sequencing arrivals into Heathrow while you work.

A clean one-minute test built by a support software company that had a very direct professional interest in typing speed.

Analogue horror shaped like a small-town TV station's broadcast archive, including the night it advised everyone to look up.

Draw circles and arrows, press play, and your scribble runs as a working feedback-loop simulation.

Browser sprite editor built around palette discipline, with the specific constraints pixel artists keep asking for.

A convincing macOS desktop rebuilt in Svelte, dock animations included, running entirely inside the browser.

Official home of the autostereograms from every 1990s shopping centre, with a fresh one each week to go cross-eyed at.

One button, one progress bar, and the firm assurance that everything is now OK, which beats the alternative.

The maker movement's own magazine: projects, tool reviews and the long-running argument about what counts as making something.

Generate a fake newspaper clipping, a talking animation or a ransom note. The 2005 internet, rebuilt so it still works.

Vintage photographs of shopping centres in their fountains-and-ferns prime, scanned from postcards and other people's family albums.

Kaleidoscopic drawing surface with adjustable mirror counts, so one wobbly line comes back as a symmetrical mandala.

Zoom into the Mandelbrot set as far as the arithmetic allows, with palette controls and no plugin to install.

Every open source project plotted as a landmass, with related repositories clustering into continents you can pan across.

Colour in countries, states or regions and export the result, which is where most of the maps you see argued about online are made.

Drops you on a random road somewhere on Earth in Street View and leaves you to work out where you are, or simply wander off down it.

Street-level photography stitched together from volunteers' dashcams and phones, covering a great many roads no Google car ever drove down.

Pomodoro, custom and kitchen-timer modes with a shareable link, so a whole team can run the same twenty-five minutes.

Live positions of the world's merchant fleet, container ships down to tugs, most vessels with photographs taken by shore spotters.

A meticulous recreation of the falling green glyphs, with settings for every version of the effect across the films.

Industrial supply catalogue with half a million parts, organised so well that engineers browse it purely for pleasure.

Every part of a wristwatch exploded and animated in sequence, until the escapement finally makes sense.

Around 140 visual phenomena, each with sliders to break the effect and a vision scientist's explanation of why you fell for it.

Long-running blog of illusions and visual puzzles, from classic ambiguous figures to whichever dress the internet is arguing about.

Search the web with the top million most popular sites removed. What is left is the internet nobody bothers optimising for.

Factory building crossed with tower defence: conveyor belts feed the guns, and the guns hold the line while you fix the belts.

Every train on the Tokyo rail network moving in real time across a 3D map, with the aircraft landing at Haneda thrown in.

Build a convincing fake post, chat or notification for a joke or a mockup. Watermarked so nobody mistakes it for the real thing.

A live tank of sea nettles drifting in blue water, which has been the internet's default calming video for years.

Builds a photo mosaic out of hundreds of your other photos, free to make and zoomable right down to each tile.

A daily logic murder mystery with suspects, weapons and locations, solved by grid deduction in about ten minutes.

Click a dial-up modem, a Nokia ringtone or a VHS rewinder and remember precisely where you were standing at the time.

Type a band and get a cloud of other bands, positioned by how often listeners like both. Crude, ancient and still weirdly effective.

Fictional US national park built inside a colossal living organism, documented entirely as tourist brochures and incident reports.