Safe at your desk

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.

A countdown of a thousand small good things, from the cold side of the pillow to popping bubble wrap, written daily for years.

The blunt one-minute word test that has served as the internet's default words-per-minute benchmark for over a decade.

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

A directory of blogs and tools that load in under one megabyte, kept as a quiet protest against bloated pages. Every link opens almost instantly.

Build ramps and walls while shooting, which is Fortnite's endgame extracted, simplified and handed over for free.

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

Mahjong solitaire in a dozen layouts with no download and no account, exactly as it was on every family PC in 2004.

A community of personal website makers with tutorials, events and a directory of members' handmade sites to wander between.

The largest archive of 360 panoramas anywhere, pinned to a world map and free to browse, covering plenty of places no Street View car reached.

A ranked list of websites that weigh less than half a megabyte. A tour of the fast, lightweight personal web, sorted from tiniest to merely small.

Straightforward pool on a proper physics table, against an opponent who punishes a lazy break immediately.

Miniclip's pool game, still the default way to lose imaginary money to a stranger in another country at half past two.

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

Collection of period-correct cursor trails — rainbows, bubbles, snowflakes, ghosts — demoed live so you can wave the mouse about.

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

The meme feed that reposts everything eventually, sorted into channels so you can choose your particular poison.

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.

Enormous free MUD with hundreds of areas and a browser client, so you can be killed by a wandering mob without installing anything.

Photographic essays on ruined institutions that are far more interested in why the places closed than in the broken glass.

Guided write-ups of the city's empty hospitals, airfields and amusement parks, complete with directions and a note on the fence situation.

Twenty-eight escalating trolley dilemmas that end somewhere very silly, each showing the percentage of people who agreed with you.

Text MUD running continuously since 1997, with a player-run economy, real politics and a genuinely intimidating combat system.

Thousands of free electronics tutorials with full wiring diagrams and working code. The gentlest on-ramp to microcontrollers there is.

One of the oldest portals still standing, from the era when a game loading in thirty seconds counted as instant.

The proper colour wheel — analogous, triadic, split complementary — plus contrast checks for accessibility.

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

Browser MMO that has shipped a story release nearly every week since 2008 and looks exactly as Flash-era as you remember.

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

Be a cell, eat smaller cells, flee larger ones and split to ambush. The game that invented this entire genre in 2015.

Text adventure with no script at all: the model invents the world as you type at it, and will happily follow you somewhere absurd.

Janelle Shane feeds neural networks recipes, paint names and knitting patterns, then reports the wreckage with real affection.

Click targets as they pop up and get scored in targets per second. Shooter players use it to warm up before a session.

Buy aircraft, plot routes and slowly discover that fuel price is the only variable that ever really mattered.

A famously unforgiving airline simulation that keeps running in real time whether or not you are logged in to watch.

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

Aerial 360 panoramas shot from helicopters and drones over volcanoes, cathedrals and Antarctic ice, most of them enormous files worth the wait.

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

Professional reviews, genre family trees and similar-artist chains inherited from the print era, which is how you get from one band to fifty.

Vast crowd-sourced recipe database where the comments are the actual feature — thousands of people telling you what to change.

Free MUD with multiclassing, a web client and a player base that has been levelling the same characters since the nineties.

Type the name of any app and get a crowd-ranked list of alternatives, filtered by platform, price and whether the project is open source.

A paused editorial preview that explains the sourcing and publishing controls required before stories return.

Genuine industrial surplus sold with the best product copy on the internet: lab glassware, small motors, and 400 unexplained springs.

Fingerprints your browser and compares it against a research dataset of hundreds of thousands of others. The verdict is usually: unique.

Free woodworking plans with cut lists and costed materials, aimed squarely at people who own exactly one saw.