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Daily gift catalogue for things nobody needs, and the reason several of your friends own a novelty tap they never use.

Fifty years of home renovation broken into how-tos, with actual tradespeople explaining why the obvious shortcut fails.

One photorealistic portrait of somebody who has never existed, regenerated on every refresh. The page that started the whole genre.

Invented dictionary entries complete with etymology and a usage example, none of them real words. Several of them deserve to be.

A shared Unix server where members publish plain HTML pages under their usernames. Started as an experiment in 2014 and still going.

World clocks, time-zone converters, sunrise and moon times, calendars and countdowns, all on one long-running and reliably accurate site.

Superhot's trick in a browser: time only moves when you do, so every room becomes a slow-motion puzzle with guns.

A photograph from the last century that you place on both a map and a timeline, which is much harder than either alone.

Wikipedia's calmly written schedule of everything still to happen, ending long after the last star has gone out.

Reverse image search that finds the oldest copy of a picture rather than visually similar ones. The tool for tracing where a photo began.

Cast, catch, sell, upgrade the line, cast deeper. The loop is completely transparent and it still takes forty minutes off you.

A collection of single-purpose online tools for web makers, from favicon makers to CSS generators, sorted by topic and searchable in one box.

A rescue that livestreams its foster kittens and feral colonies around the clock, with vets narrating in the chat.

Drag in PNGs and JPEGs and they come back far smaller with no visible difference. Nothing else to learn.

One line of maths drives a sixteen-by-sixteen grid of dots, and the gallery of what people fit into that line is humbling.

A daily five-minute roundup of tech, science and programming news, with every issue also readable on the website.

A quick whiteboard in the browser: sketch boxes, arrows and doodles, share a link and draw together in real time without making an account.

The outlet that breaks the story first and considers taste afterwards, with a documented record of being right.

Reddit's fact firehose, where each post is one verified surprise with the source link attached underneath.

Scanned cereal boxes going back decades, with full career histories for the mascots, maintained purely for its own sake.

The onion router straight from the people who maintain it — the browser download plus a plain-English account of how the relays work.

Tap any key in rhythm and it plays the next chunk of Clair de Lune, so timing is the only skill actually required.

Match-three fused with tower defence, so every swap you make is also the wave you are currently surviving.

Click to place a block and a small algorithm builds a plausible seaside town around it, with no goal of any kind.

Paste a single screenshot and it names the anime, the episode and the exact timestamp. Unreasonably accurate for something free.

Guess the country from a treemap of what it exports, which turns out to be an oddly precise national fingerprint.

Bounces a sentence between English and Japanese until the two versions agree, which they rarely do politely.

Get from one country to another by naming every country in between, with the shortest workable route scoring best.

Drops you into a field recording from a forest somewhere on earth, tells you which forest, then offers you another.

Bridge, euchre, hearts and spades against bots or friends, on a table that behaves the way a real one does.

Send tiny creatures up an infinite tower, die, come back stronger. Years of content behind an interface that gives no quarter.

Raw model output laid out for people who want to read the charts themselves, and the page hurricane watchers keep open all August.

Australia's national archive of newspapers, websites and photographs, digitised back to 1803 and open without an account.

The big one: broadcast radio, sport and podcasts from most of the world, free with adverts and no account needed to listen.

Fly down a rotating tunnel of coloured obstacles quickly enough that your eyes take over the steering from your brain.

Write a Turing machine in a few lines and watch the tape head shuffle back and forth carrying it out.

Plotter art drawn by a virtual turtle in a hundred-odd lines of JavaScript, with everybody's source code on display.

Searchable captions across millions of hours of broadcast news, which makes it possible to find the exact moment something was said.

A taxonomy of every storytelling device ever used, cross-linked so densely that leaving takes actual discipline.

The tool behind half the interactive fiction of the past decade, running in the browser and learnable in about twenty minutes.

Same idea as typing but with notes rather than drums — write a paragraph, receive a surprisingly pretty melody.

Type words and each letter becomes a drum hit, so your own name comes out as a loop you will struggle to stop playing.

Practise typing by working through actual novels, so the warm-up leaves you a few pages of Dostoevsky instead of nonsense.

Races you against real people typing the same passage, which is the only known method of making a typing test tense.

A complete free typing course with lessons, tests and games, the sort of thing schools pay for and this one does not charge.

Typing practice on real open-source code, complete with the brackets and semicolons that ruin everyone's average.

Structured typing lessons with a hand diagram that shows precisely which finger you have been cheating with all along.

Vast unofficial archive of avant-garde film, sound and writing, run on no budget whatsoever and hosted like it is still 1998.