Feels like magic

Live tracking for thousands of satellites, with pass predictions for your postcode and a map of everything above you right now.

Type a surname and get where it came from, what it originally meant and where in the world it still clusters.

The official live stream, which for long stretches is simply Earth turning below the space station.

Georeferenced Ordnance Survey sheets you can fade against satellite imagery to see exactly what got demolished.

Run a country by answering one absurd policy dilemma a day, then watch your statistics drift somewhere you did not intend.

The live feed from a deep-sea research ship's remote submersible, complete with scientists audibly losing composure over a new sea cucumber.

Neal Agarwal's collection of interactive toys and explainers, every one of them built far better than it needed to be.

Wordle for equations: eight tiles holding one arithmetic statement that has to balance as well as being correct.

Board games rebuilt for a group on a video call, with each person playing from their own phone. Codenames and Wavelength included.

A vaporwave station running continuously since 2015, wrapped in a desktop you can rearrange while it plays.

Fast, minimal tracker that pings you the moment a followed episode airs. Open source and deliberately kept lightweight.

Notebooks for building charts in the browser, with a public gallery of thousands you can fork and pull apart.

Physically modelled sea you can retune — wind speed, swell, choppiness — rendering waves that behave properly.

A cabinet of small physics experiments — cloth, water, ragdolls, particles — built by one developer who simply kept going.

Eldritch horror podcast set in an alternate Appalachia where the mountains are older than people and considerably less friendly.

Browses the archives through emulated period browsers, so an old page renders the way it did rather than the way Chrome guesses.

Screenshots of archived GeoCities pages posted automatically, one after another, as a rolling portrait of the amateur web.

Multi-instrument piano roll in a browser, backed by thousands of user sequences you can open, pull apart and ruin.

Spin a globe, drop on a city, hear whatever its local radio is playing right now. Works best somewhere you have never been.

Gallery of Processing and p5.js sketches where every piece runs in the page and the source is right there to fork.

A research-grade open flight tracking network run by universities, with live maps and the raw historical data behind them.

A sealed glass sphere of water, sand and brine shrimp that you seed and then leave running, ecosystem permitting.

Stanford's model of travel in the Roman world — pick two cities and get the cost, season and days by road or sea.

Write creative code in one pane and watch it run in the next, with no install, no build step and no configuration.

Colourises black-and-white photographs, then lets you steer the result by describing the colours you wanted in words.

MIT's ranking of historically famous people by how many language editions of Wikipedia bother to carry them.

Scroll to unroll an infinite toilet roll and scroll back to wind it up, presented by the artist with a completely straight face.

Noughts and crosses, gomoku and Connect Four against a real stranger, matched in about four seconds with no signup.

Drag mildly biased shapes around a grid and watch a segregated neighbourhood assemble itself without anyone intending it.

Home of Submachine and Daymare Town, Mateusz Skutnik's sketched, wordless worlds built entirely out of corridors and quiet dread.

Every letter on the keyboard fires a sound and a matching shape, and mashing the whole row is the correct way to use it.

Random generators for anything, built from plain text lists you can fork and edit yourself. Thousands of community ones already exist.

Draw a circle with the mouse and get scored on it to one decimal place. Nobody in recorded history has stopped after one attempt.

Draw a circle with one unbroken stroke and get scored on how round it actually was. Nobody beats 97% on a trackpad.

Proper trait questionnaires with the scoring shown, rather than a quiz that decides you are a golden retriever.

Plays YouTube videos with almost no views, which turn out to be mostly a stranger's kitchen and a camera left running.

Colorado's library of physics, chemistry and maths simulations, used in classrooms everywhere and free to meddle with.

Interactive tests designed to find the contradictions in your own stated beliefs, the classic being Battleground God.

Photoshop in a browser tab, layers and all, and it opens Sketch and XD files too. One developer, no sign-up, ads pay for the whole thing.

Sprite and animation editor with onion skinning and a live loop preview, exporting straight to a spritesheet or GIF.

Draw on the grid and it writes the box-shadow monstrosity that renders your sprite with no image file involved at all.

Feed it a photograph and it hands back a pixel-art version, with block size and palette entirely under your control.

Type in the thing you are stressed about, watch it shrink into a distant star over sixty seconds, then close the tab.

Open-source pixel editor with tilemaps, animation and 3D layers, playable in the browser or free to download properly.

Two editors in one — a quick one and a layered one — both free in the browser with the usual filters and masks.

Live flight tracking with an augmented-reality view, for pointing a phone at whatever just went over the garden and naming it.

Type a phrase and watch every film clip in which somebody says it, cut back to back until the words stop meaning anything.

Put your cursor anywhere on the page and it finds a photograph of a person pointing at exactly that spot.