Safe at your desk

Scan a barcode and get ingredients, additives and a nutrition score from a database anyone can edit. Wikipedia for groceries.

A catalogue page for every book ever published, a good many of them borrowable straight in the browser.

A hand-drawn library of mix-and-match people, free for anything, and quietly the source of half the internet's illustrations.

Free, ad-free versions of the actual academic instruments, with the collected raw data published for anyone who wants to poke at it.

Open-source successor to Territorial.io: push borders across a world map, form alliances and break them at precisely the right moment.

A free street-view guessing game with unlimited rounds, built for people unwilling to pay a monthly subscription to look at roads.

Open-source emoji set drawn by design students, free to use, and in several places noticeably better than the defaults.

Gallery of Processing and p5.js sketches where every piece runs in the page and the source is right there to fork.

Every railway line on Earth mapped with signalling, gauge, electrification and maximum speed, by people who care about this very deeply.

A research-grade open flight tracking network run by universities, with live maps and the raw historical data behind them.

Searches around a billion openly licensed images and audio files, with the licence terms attached to every single result.

A sealed glass sphere of water, sand and brine shrimp that you seed and then leave running, ecosystem permitting.

Stanford's model of travel in the Roman world — pick two cities and get the cost, season and days by road or sea.

Oxford's open charts on poverty, energy, health and war, with the underlying data downloadable from every single one.

The souped-up fork of the infinite text canvas, with colour, links and long-running territory disputes conducted entirely in ASCII.

Write creative code in one pane and watch it run in the next, with no install, no build step and no configuration.

John McLeod's encyclopedia of card game rules, covering every regional variant of everything and settling every dispute.

Recorded user flows from real products, so you can watch an onboarding happen rather than guess at how it went.

The New York Post's gossip column, now its own site, still running on restaurant tip-offs and unnamed sources.

Colourises black-and-white photographs, then lets you steer the result by describing the colours you wanted in words.

The old-school colour scheme designer: one wheel, a live preview page, and far more control than the modern tools.

MIT's ranking of historically famous people by how many language editions of Wikipedia bother to carry them.

Build sundaes to order under mounting time pressure, the most polished entry in a series about the dignity of service work.

The original of the Papa's series, where tips fund your upgrades and customers absolutely notice an undercooked base.

Fold a paper plane, throw it, and catch one somebody launched in another country. Nothing else happens, which is the point.

Scroll to unroll an infinite toilet roll and scroll back to wind it up, presented by the artist with a completely straight face.

Claim territory by driving loops around it while everyone else tries to clip your tail before you make it home.

Noughts and crosses, gomoku and Connect Four against a real stranger, matched in about four seconds with no signup.

Drag mildly biased shapes around a grid and watch a segregated neighbourhood assemble itself without anyone intending it.

Race a crowd of runners up a rooftop obstacle course where the only real skill is jumping at the right half-second.

Home of Submachine and Daymare Town, Mateusz Skutnik's sketched, wordless worlds built entirely out of corridors and quiet dread.

Historically accurate emulations of early PCs, down to the timing, with the original manuals and ROM listings alongside.

A database of essentially every named summit on Earth, with prominence figures, ascent logs and rankings that fuel very long arguments.

Penalty shootouts through a whole tournament, against a keeper who reads your run-up better than you would like.

The longest-running games comic on the web, three strips a week since 1998, plus the posts that built an industry.

Random generators for anything, built from plain text lists you can fork and edit yourself. Thousands of community ones already exist.

Draw a circle with the mouse and get scored on it to one decimal place. Nobody in recorded history has stopped after one attempt.

Draw a circle with one unbroken stroke and get scored on how round it actually was. Nobody beats 97% on a trackpad.

A crowd-voted encyclopaedia arguing over the MBTI and enneagram type of every fictional character and public figure in existence.

Proper trait questionnaires with the scoring shown, rather than a quiz that decides you are a golden retriever.

A hand-drawn character builder in the Open Peeps style, producing an avatar that does not look machine-generated.

Every adoptable animal in a hundred thousand shelters, searchable by postcode, which is dangerous browsing after 11pm.

Sixteen questions sort you into one of Pew's nine American political groups, with a decade of real survey data behind every one.

Colorado's library of physics, chemistry and maths simulations, used in classrooms everywhere and free to meddle with.

Interactive tests designed to find the contradictions in your own stated beliefs, the classic being Battleground God.

Puts your face on billboards, banknotes and museum walls using several hundred templates. Aggressively 2009.

Airtight's glitch lab, stacking VHS tracking errors, pixel sorting and RGB shift over a photo, a clip or your webcam.

Photoshop in a browser tab, layers and all, and it opens Sketch and XD files too. One developer, no sign-up, ads pay for the whole thing.