Safe at your desk

Screenshot library of real mobile and web apps, organised by flow, so you can see how everybody else solved it first.

Build a convincing fake post, chat or notification for a joke or a mockup. Watermarked so nobody mistakes it for the real thing.

A search engine that crawls the web with its own bot rather than renting results from the giants, and does not track who is searching.

Search any molecule and spin its three-dimensional structure, with spectra and crystal data alongside it.

The typing test that made typing tests beautiful — endlessly configurable, instantly readable and quietly addictive.

Live cameras on the kelp forest, the aviary and the open sea tank, plus a sea otter feed that has ended many working afternoons.

A live tank of sea nettles drifting in blue water, which has been the internet's default calming video for years.

Chop wood, raise windmills, then defend them from players who would much rather take yours than build their own.

MIT's trolley problem for driverless cars: decide who the car kills, thirteen times over, then read your own bias summarised back.

Builds a photo mosaic out of hundreds of your other photos, free to make and zoomable right down to each tile.

Time-trial motorbike stunts across levels engineered to kill you in a slightly funnier way on each attempt.

The bike stunt series relocated to a water park, where the traps are inflatable and no less lethal for it.

Filters every streaming catalogue at once by genre, rating and service, then hands you exactly one thing to watch.

A daily logic murder mystery with suspects, weapons and locations, solved by grid deduction in about ten minutes.

Art too bad to be ignored, collected since 1993 and catalogued with entirely straight-faced curatorial commentary.

Los Angeles museum whose exhibits may or may not be true, with a website built in exactly the same ambiguous spirit.

Every format anybody ever stored anything on, documented with photographs and the dates it lived between. Far more than you expect.

An exhaustive archive of worlds built in a 1991 ASCII game creator, catalogued with more care than most national collections.

Type a band and get a cloud of other bands, positioned by how often listeners like both. Crude, ancient and still weirdly effective.

The open music encyclopedia much of the industry quietly relies on, editable by anybody and free of any label's marketing department.

A non-profit, open-source search engine with its own index, curated by volunteers. Results feel nothing like the big engines, which is the point.

The default anime and manga database and tracker since 2004, and the source of the scores everyone else ends up quoting.

Fictional US national park built inside a colossal living organism, documented entirely as tourist brochures and incident reports.

A twenty-level escape game from 2001 that defined the whole genre several years before the genre had a name for itself.

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 American government's public database of missing and unidentified persons, searchable by absolutely anyone.

Capture the flag with bows and low-poly castles, where arcing a shot over a wall beats raw reflexes almost every time.

Active fire and thermal anomaly detections from NASA satellites, updated within hours of each pass and quietly sobering at continental zoom.

Every photograph, video and audio recording NASA has released, searchable and free to use for anything.

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

The full NASA satellite archive as daily global mosaics, with a date slider you can drag back two decades to watch ice, dust and smoke move.

The searchable index of American federal records, running from founding documents to recently declassified memos.

The official Atlantic and Pacific hurricane advisories, cones of uncertainty and discussion notes written in plain prose by duty forecasters.

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.

Neal Agarwal's collection of one-idea interactive toys, from spending Bill Gates' money to scrolling the whole ocean floor.

A blog of neat things — odd history, strange products, good comics — running since 2005 with no algorithm involved.

A free host for handmade personal sites in the Neocities spirit, with a browse page full of members' pages to click through.

A free host built as a deliberate successor to GeoCities, full of hand-written personal pages by people who wanted to make one.

The 1999 virtual pet site whose real game was always the economy — shops, a stock market and genuinely vicious restocking.

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

Rhizome's restored survey of a hundred works of net art, each with the context needed to understand why it mattered.

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

UK spoof news updated several times a day, best read as running commentary on whatever is currently going wrong.

A morning briefing of good stories, written for people who want a news habit that does not ruin breakfast.

Thirty years of usability research written up plainly and still free to read, which is why everyone cites it.

The studio behind Bloons, with a browser games shelf that still hosts the tower defence titles the genre was built on.