Safe at your desk

Indexes only independent personal websites whose owners submitted them. No content farms, because there is nothing there to farm.

You are a colony ship AI choosing which disasters to absorb, and every run ends with a summary of how badly humanity settled.

Brown University's visual introduction to probability and statistics, one animated chapter per concept.

The original semantic-distance guessing game, noticeably harder than its descendants and considerably more humbling.

Word association against a neural net: type anything related to the highlighted block and it clears. Built by Google's research team.

Raw Sentinel and Landsat imagery for anywhere on the planet, free, with band combinations that reveal crops, floods and old burn scars.

Recipes that explain the science first and then tell you what to do. The food-lab pieces are why it has the reputation it has.

Short visual explanations of statistics ideas — eigenvectors, conditional probability, Markov chains — all draggable.

Thousands of full-screen graphics experiments, each one a few hundred lines of maths you can read and edit live.

Drag the control points of a letter back into shape. Your score is how far off the real typeface you landed.

Random design briefs with a countdown attached, for when the problem is not skill but having nothing to work on.

A first-person shooter in which every player is an egg and every hit is messy. Considerably better than that premise deserves.

A full year of merchant shipping movements animated on one dark globe and split by cargo type, which turns global trade into a visible swarm.

Search engine for internet-connected devices rather than pages: webcams, routers and industrial kit nobody meant to publish.

A daily high-resolution photograph from the early twentieth century, usually with commenters identifying the buildings.

Ragdoll obstacle course whose entire design goal is taking your stickman apart in an inventive new way each level.

The Hacker News lane where people post things they built themselves: odd side projects, tiny tools and a frank comment thread under each one.

A live feed of OpenStreetMap edits as they happen, zooming to each contributor's patch of the world one small correction at a time.

Doom compiled to WebAssembly and running at full speed in a tab, which is either nostalgia or a small engineering miracle.

Symmetrical generative art that blooms under the cursor, which everybody who touches it turns into a wallpaper factory.

A no-frills portal unusually strong on two-player games you can play on one keyboard with somebody sitting next to you.

A persistent economic simulation where thousands of players genuinely supply each other, so prices move for real reasons.

Forty logic puzzles on one page, each generated fresh and each solvable by pure reasoning. The interface is ancient and it does not matter.

Enter any two articles and get every shortest path of links between them, drawn as a graph you can drag.

An infinite canvas for rough diagrams and flows. Opens instantly with nothing to configure and no file to save first.

A better-drawn take on the guess-the-doodle format, with more brushes, custom word lists and rooms that hold a large group.

Full paint program in a tab — brushes, layers, filters and a stamp library — with nothing to install and nothing to pay.

Draw the word, guess everyone else's, share one link with the group. The default browser party game, and deservedly so.

The world's largest supplier of real and replica skulls, browsable by species, which is educational and mildly alarming in equal parts.

Live HD cameras on piazzas, beaches and ski slopes across Europe and beyond, which is the closest a browser tab gets to a day trip.

The seat-pocket catalogue survived the airline it came with and moved online, still selling garden yetis to a captive audience.

The custom emoji every workplace eventually accumulates, downloadable as a pack. The party parrot is in there.

News for nerds since 1997, with tech headlines and threaded comments kept in order by a reader moderation system older than most social networks.

Grow a snake on glowing pellets and cut other players off so they burst into more of them. The .io boom started here.

Roll a ball down an endless neon slope at rising speed until the geometry wins, which it always eventually does.

An endless procedurally generated drive through mountains and deserts, with no traffic, no timer and nothing to hit.

Three-minute kart deathmatches with weapon crates and absolutely no patience for anything resembling a racing line.

The National Zoo's cameras on lions, elephants and naked mole rats, publicly funded and refreshingly free of any advertising.

Millions of images and 3D scans from the Smithsonian's collections, released with no copyright restrictions at all.

Giant pandas eating bamboo, live from Washington, on the webcam that periodically takes down the zoo's own servers.

Deb Perelman cooking from a famously tiny New York kitchen since 2006, testing everything obsessively and writing about it well.

An endless sheet of virtual bubble wrap that pops under the cursor and quietly refills itself behind you.

The original rumour desk, still patiently establishing whether the thing your uncle forwarded actually happened.

Two-legged football played with a single key, in which the physics engine scores most of the actual goals.

Fast three-a-side football with sliding tackles and a World Cup bracket you can win inside a tea break.

Push crates into place in rooms built to punish the obvious first move, with thousands of community-made levels behind them.

Clean solitaire collection with hints, statistics and daily challenges spread across a dozen different variants.

Daily solitaire challenges dealt from guaranteed-winnable shuffles, with a leaderboard for people who want the streak.