Collection
Silent by default, visually unremarkable over a shoulder, and free of anything that would make a passing manager slow down.
1,201 sites · page 10 of 26
Grey text on beige, no images, and the best comment threads anywhere about how technical things actually work. Search covers twenty years.
A weekly, hand-picked digest of the best Hacker News links, with an archive of past issues you can browse straight from the site.
Mash any keys and perfectly formatted code appears character by character, exactly as in every hacking scene ever filmed.
Generates blobs, waves, stacked layers and low-poly grids as SVG, all of them tweakable and all free to export.
Vector halftone generator that rebuilds an image out of dots, lines or waves and exports it as clean SVG.
Mr Doob's sketching toy, where strokes web themselves together with connecting threads and turn scribbles into shading.
One word of reassurance about the Large Hadron Collider, maintained since 2008 and still, reassuringly, saying no.
Seventeen million scanned volumes from research libraries, with full-text search running across the entire lot.
Football management one week at a time since 1997, with a transfer market and an economy run entirely by other managers.
Type an email address and find out which breaches it turned up in. Troy Hunt's index now covers billions of leaked accounts.
The cult's own website, left exactly as it was in 1997 and still quietly maintained. A sobering artefact rather than a joke.
Tells you exactly when the space station will pass over your garden, and which direction to look.
A superhero character creator with a costume parts library deep enough to have outlasted three separate web technologies.
Shoot the alien whose colour matches the hex code shown. Learning to read hex by sight is an accidental side effect.
Falling blocks rotated onto a hexagon and sped up, which sounds like a novelty and turns out to be genuinely hard.
Placeholder text made of artisanal nonsense, optionally cut with real Latin for clients who prefer not to notice.
Every event on Wikipedia plotted as a dot across fourteen billion years, filterable down to one category at a time.
Old photographs pinned to the exact street corner where they were taken, fading into the modern view behind.
Full-text search across every Hacker News story and comment, filterable by date and points. Find the thread where a famous project first appeared.
Tens of thousands of hosted model demos, each running in a browser tab. The closest thing machine learning has to an arcade.
Reaction time, sequence memory, the chimp test and verbal memory, each scored against millions of other people's attempts.
Charts and datasets tracking long-run trends in health, income and violence, useful ammunition for pessimistic dinner parties.
Allie Brosh's illustrated essays, including the two on depression that remain the best thing written about it.
The lolcat archive that taught the internet its first grammar, still posting captioned animals two decades later.
Spot the serif among the sans-serifs before the timer runs out. Ten seconds long and disproportionately stressful.
Every known way to lace and tie a shoe, diagrammed by one Australian for over two decades, including a knot he invented himself.
Several hundred psychological tests, from serious personality inventories to deeply unserious ones, all free and all instant.
Overlays one country on another to scale, then works out how your life expectancy, income and odds of various things would change there.
A map of the solar system drawn to true scale, meaning most of your scrolling is spent crossing absolutely nothing.
Mocks up a screenshot of a conversation that never happened, for jokes and design mock-ups rather than anything serious.
Catalogue, reviews and play links for four decades of interactive fiction, maintained by people who take the form extremely seriously.
Free illustrated repair manuals for phones, laptops, cars and appliances, plus teardowns that name and shame every glued-in battery.
Popular science headlines with the volume turned up, handy for the fact you half-remember reading somewhere.
A philosophy department's catalogue of illusions, each with what it is, what it demonstrates, and the argument still going about it.
Merge, split, compress, rotate, sign and convert PDFs from a single page. Covers nearly everything Acrobat charges a subscription for.
Warps a photograph through a draggable mesh, so faces melt by exactly as much as you decide they should.
Rebuilds a photograph out of coloured triangles, with sliders controlling exactly how abstract you want to get.
The canonical crowd-ranked list of 250 films, weighted to resist review bombing. A reliable way to spot the gap in your viewing.
Every meme template with the text boxes already in the right places, and no watermark once you find the setting.
Catalogue of impossible figures, ambiguous objects and Escher-adjacent architecture, kept up by one very devoted collector.
Post-apocalyptic comedy RPG with turn-based fights, base building and a tone somewhere between Douglas Adams and a mild fever.
A calendar of every conjunction, eclipse and meteor shower coming up, with charts drawn for your own location.
Every plant and animal anybody has photographed and posted, mapped, with a community that will identify your mystery beetle within hours.
The wiki of a movement for owning your own website: guides, tools and real examples of people publishing on their own domains.
A sheet of bubble wrap that never runs out. Pop with a click or drag across a row, and it refills the moment you finish.
Combine two things to make a third, forever, until you have coaxed a language model into inventing something absurd.
Classic Mac OS booting instantly in a browser, with the software of the period already installed and ready to open.
Numbers-heavy tower defence with endless mode, research trees and the general energy of a very well-kept spreadsheet.
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
1,201 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 18 of them are AltF originals that run right here.
1,132 of the 1,201 are free and need no account. 2 are paid or freemium, and the card says so.
757 of 1,201 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 1,201 are safe for work and 1,201 work with the sound off.