Safe at your desk

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 big set of free PDF tools in the browser: merge, split, compress, convert and sign documents without creating an account first.

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 plain list of personal websites, each added by its owner. Pick any name and you land on somebody's homepage, built exactly how they like it.

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 rebuilt in a tab, opening PSD, XCF and Sketch files. Free, and startlingly close to the real thing.

A Japanese platform hosting tens of thousands of illustrator-made avatar makers, each one in a completely different style.

Sprite and animation editor with onion skinning and a live loop preview, exporting straight to a spritesheet or GIF.

Weather model charts for anywhere in the world, fast and free, of the sort forecasters look at rather than the tidied-up app version.

Names a pixel size and asks you to drag a box exactly that big. Nobody is as good at this as they assume.

Grid, palette, mouse. The whole tool fits on one page and you are drawing about three seconds after it loads.

Draw on the grid and it writes the box-shadow monstrosity that renders your sprite with no image file involved at all.

Feed it a photograph and it hands back a pixel-art version, with block size and palette entirely under your control.

Two decades of the pixel art scene's best work, still curated by hand and still running weekly drawing challenges.

Type in the thing you are stressed about, watch it shrink into a distant star over sixty seconds, then close the tab.

Open-source pixel editor with tilemaps, animation and 3D layers, playable in the browser or free to download properly.

Sprite editor with layers and animation frames, wrapped in an unusually friendly community gallery of other people's work.

Two editors in one — a quick one and a layered one — both free in the browser with the usual filters and masks.

Live flight tracking with an augmented-reality view, for pointing a phone at whatever just went over the garden and naming it.

A virtual table with real decks you drag around by hand, for playing whatever house rules your group refuses to drop.

A plain, fast game server that has outlived every redesign trend since 2001 and still hosts chess, draughts and mahjong.

Daily roundups of the funniest things posted elsewhere, a genre this one has been working since 2009.

Every Poe story and poem with annotations, a timeline and a vocabulary tool, kept by one enthusiast since the early web.

Put your cursor anywhere on the page and it finds a photograph of a person pointing at exactly that spot.