Safe at your desk

Daily tips on doing ordinary things slightly better, running since 2005 and still occasionally genuinely surprising.

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

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

Car leasing sold via the loudest website ever built — animated GIFs, a theme-park aesthetic, and a real business underneath it.

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.

Wikipedia's index of its own indexes, which is either a long-running joke or the purest expression of the site.

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

A quiet turn-based server for abstract strategy games — Hex, TwixT, Amazons — where matches last months and nobody rushes you.

A full WarCraft-style real-time strategy game running in a browser tab, complete with multiplayer, a map editor and a scripting API.

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

Cameras pointed at geysers, glaciers, harbours and whichever volcano is currently misbehaving, plus a northern lights feed in winter.

Daily science news with a weakness for the strange finds — mummies, deep sea oddities, cosmic near misses.

Seasonal chart of everything currently airing, with countdowns to the next episode and which service is carrying it.

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

Clickable map quizzes for every region on Earth, unfashionable in design and better than everything that has replaced it.

A fake executive dashboard of charts and metrics that keeps updating itself while you stare thoughtfully past it.

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

The canonical placeholder text, plus the Cicero passage it was cut from and an explanation of what it says.

Thousands of curated palettes, from Game Boy green to 64-colour monsters, each downloadable in every format going.

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

The looser, stranger sibling of the main lost media wiki, with more speculation and considerably more unresolved threads.

The best-known brain-training subscription, with a free daily set of games and rather a lot of graphs about your own decline.

The official Escher archive: the impossible staircases, the tessellations, and his own notes on how he worked them out.

Korean home cooking taught with video for everything, including how to make the kimchi rather than quietly buy a jar of it.

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

The same ramp-covered playground with strangers in it, all attempting the same enormous jump and all missing it.

An empty city full of ramps and supercars with no objectives at all, which turns out to be the entire objective.

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

Deliberately tiny paint tool inside a fake old window, with fat pixels and a palette that makes clumsy art look intentional.

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

Everyone captions the same image, then votes on the best one. Rounds are short and a group works out its own humour quickly.

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.

The manga-side release tracker, covering scanlation status and licensing across tens of thousands of series since 2001.

Millions of product manuals as PDFs, for the appliance whose paperwork went in the recycling back in 2011.

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.

An index deliberately built to favour text-heavy non-commercial pages. Ranking that punishes ad load instead of rewarding it.

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

Virtual trading contests running on live market data, playable against colleagues without anybody risking actual money.

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

Live map of which McDonald's ice cream machines are broken, built by repeatedly adding a sundae to a cart. Petty, rigorous, brilliant.