Safe at your desk

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 interactive toys and explainers, every one of them built far better than it needed to be.

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

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.

Racing where the accelerator is your typing speed, making it the only competitive driving game that leaves you better at something.

A British studio that made pixel-perfect browser games for fifteen years and then put the entire back catalogue up free.

The thirty-minute aurora forecast as an oval of probability drawn over the poles, which is the only honest way to plan a night out for it.

Retail and service workers' stories about customers, filed daily, and a bottomless argument for tipping generously.

Everybody notable enough for a Wikipedia entry, plotted at their birthplace, so you can find out who else came from your town.

Fast, minimal tracker that pings you the moment a followed episode airs. Open source and deliberately kept lightweight.

Minecraft skin editor with a 3D preview you can spin, plus a gallery of other people's skins to take apart and reuse.

One well-sourced strange story per weekday, told at exactly the length of a cup of coffee.

The US National Weather Service radar, unstyled and authoritative, with warning polygons drawn straight over the raw returns.

Nine hundred thousand digitised items from the New York Public Library, a large share of it public domain.

Notebooks for building charts in the browser, with a public gallery of thousands you can fork and pull apart.

Physically modelled sea you can retune — wind speed, swell, choppiness — rendering waves that behave properly.

Tagged great whites ping their position whenever a fin breaks the surface, each shark named, weighed and given its own profile page.

Feed of products that should not exist, from bacon-scented soap to a hammock designed to hang under your desk.

The LiveJournal community that outlived LiveJournal, still posting celebrity news with the comment threads doing the work.

A cabinet of small physics experiments — cloth, water, ragdolls, particles — built by one developer who simply kept going.

Search hundreds of thousands of scanned historical maps by place and date, held by libraries worldwide.

The 2007 build of RuneScape, still updated by player vote and still fully playable in a browser tab you should not have open.

Eighty thousand New York photographs from the 1870s onwards, mapped to the corners they were shot on.

Browses the archives through emulated period browsers, so an old page renders the way it did rather than the way Chrome guesses.

An encyclopedia of the world's writing systems, including the invented, the extinct and the barely attested.

A million checkboxes shared by everyone at once. Ticking them was pointless right up until people started writing messages in binary.

Screenshots of archived GeoCities pages posted automatically, one after another, as a rolling portrait of the amateur web.

Where English words came from, sourced and dated, compiled by one man who has been at it since 2000.

The English-speaking world's Go server, where correspondence games run for weeks and somebody always explains why your move was bad.

Hand-curated index of several thousand active blogs, sorted by subject, for when you want writing rather than a feed.

Twenty years of large-format photography inside abandoned asylums, power stations and factories, catalogued site by site.

A daily index of the free courses, audiobooks, films and ebooks scattered across the rest of the internet.