Safe at your desk

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.

Compare image codecs side by side with a draggable split, and see precisely what each quality setting costs you.

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.

Search results passed through without the tracking, plus an option to open any result through a proxy so the site never sees your address.

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.

The endless runner that ate mobile gaming, in a browser tab with the trains, the hoverboards and the shouting guard intact.

Clean daily sudoku across five difficulties, with a notes mode that behaves the way a pencil is supposed to.

Drop fruit into a box, merge matching pairs and watch the pile creep towards the line. Physics does the rest of the work.

Good news, funny pictures and a daily dose of animals, assembled with no interest whatsoever in what is trending.

Tick off what is genuinely in your cupboards and it ranks the recipes you can make right now, with nothing missing.

The seven-day jam build where time only moves when you do, still free in the browser and still one of the decade's best ideas.

Real-time First World War grand strategy played over weeks against dozens of other people, most of whom will lie to you.

The community revival of surviv.io, the sharp little 2D battle royale that was shut down and flatly refused to stay dead.

Breed meat, then drones, then queens, then things with far too many legs. The exponential curve is the entire narrative.

Ascending through increasingly abstract mathematics, with a community that treats optimising it as a competitive spreadsheet sport.

Board games rendered as physical objects on a 3D table with no rules enforcement, so you can still play badly like at home.

Base building with tameable pets, farming and raids, which is a lot of systems for something that loads instantly.

World atlas of traditional dishes and the specific places that still make them properly. Endless, and reliably makes you hungry.

Name something you liked and it returns things with the same texture, spanning films, books, music and games at once.

A collaborative database of example sentences translated across languages, better than any dictionary for context.