Safe at your desk

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.

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.