Safe at your desk

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

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.

Klondike that loads in under a second, with nothing on the page except green baize and the cards.

The newsroom that trains other newsrooms to cover responses instead of problems, with a searchable tracker of the results.

Rule a small kingdom by answering yes or no to whoever walks through the door, then watch the consequences quietly pile up.

The South Park character maker that has been running since 1999 and still gets updated with props from new episodes.

Ride a lift from the ground to geostationary orbit, passing every layer of atmosphere and satellite on the way.

The original film's promotional site, left online untouched for nearly thirty years and preserved when the sequel arrived.

Extrudes type into three dimensions, wraps it round shapes and lets it drift, exporting the result as a loop.

Solar flares, sunspot counts and geomagnetic storm levels in real time, plus the aurora forecast that decides whether tonight is worth the drive.

Code typing drills across a dozen languages, where the indentation is handled for you and the punctuation certainly is not.

Seven letters, one compulsory centre letter, and the long climb from Solid to Genius. Ruins mornings extremely productively.

A hundred billion dollars and a shopping list running from Big Macs to aircraft carriers, and it is harder to spend than you expect.

Hundreds of thousands of user-made timed quizzes: name every element, every country, every Friends character. The genre's warehouse.

NASA's tracker for when the space station is visible from where you live, with sighting alerts by email.

Paste any text and it flashes one word at a time at a speed you pick, which is either speed reading or a mild trance.

Tilemap editor for small games — paint a level from a tileset, then export it straight into Godot or Unity.

Everyone knows the location except the spy, who has to bluff through the questioning without ever revealing they have no idea.

A daily letter grid with dozens of words buried in it, plus a bonus list that runs on far longer than anyone expects.

Constructive journalism collected from other outlets into one free feed, so somebody else does all the sifting.

Compress an image with a live before-and-after slider and every codec knob exposed. Runs entirely in the browser, so nothing is uploaded.

Grades any public HTTPS server from A+ down to F and explains every single deduction. The reference test the whole industry quotes.

Public domain classics reset properly — typography fixed, typos corrected, covers designed — and then given away.

Curated collections around specific research subjects, preserved because a university decided they would matter later.

Survival game about not freezing to death, in which the other players are the weather's most enthusiastic accomplices.

Ask a sports question in plain English and get the actual numbers back with a chart. Ends pub arguments in about four seconds.

The planetarium in a browser tab — set your location and it shows exactly what is above you right now.

Swing a stick figure between grapple points using one button, then trust momentum to carry the mistake.

Categories under a random letter and a timer: name a country, a food and an animal starting with M, then hit stop before anyone else.

Long-form serialised fiction with a reader built for actually reading — chapter memory, no pop-ups, no interruptions.

A word search with a theme you have to deduce first, and one spangram threading corner to corner through the grid.

Round-the-clock video study rooms full of strangers revising in silence, with pomodoro timers ticking in the corner.

Gag gift shop selling the same reliable nonsense since the dot-com boom, on a layout that has aged in real time.

The actual cables carrying the internet between continents, each one named, with its landing points and the year it went live.