Safe at your desk

Live positions and finder charts for planets, comets and asteroids, updated continuously and free of clutter.

Aggregates hundreds of critics' polls into a ranked thousand greatest films. Deeply unfashionable design, entirely unmatched rigour.

Pour coloured sand into layered dunes with the mouse, which is considerably more absorbing than it has any right to be.

Daily gift catalogue for things nobody needs, and the reason several of your friends own a novelty tap they never use.

Fifty years of home renovation broken into how-tos, with actual tradespeople explaining why the obvious shortcut fails.

One photorealistic portrait of somebody who has never existed, regenerated on every refresh. The page that started the whole genre.

Invented dictionary entries complete with etymology and a usage example, none of them real words. Several of them deserve to be.

Superhot's trick in a browser: time only moves when you do, so every room becomes a slow-motion puzzle with guns.

A photograph from the last century that you place on both a map and a timeline, which is much harder than either alone.

Wikipedia's calmly written schedule of everything still to happen, ending long after the last star has gone out.

Reverse image search that finds the oldest copy of a picture rather than visually similar ones. The tool for tracing where a photo began.

Cast, catch, sell, upgrade the line, cast deeper. The loop is completely transparent and it still takes forty minutes off you.

A rescue that livestreams its foster kittens and feral colonies around the clock, with vets narrating in the chat.

Drag in PNGs and JPEGs, get them back visibly identical and roughly seventy per cent smaller. Twenty files at a time, free.

One line of maths drives a sixteen-by-sixteen grid of dots, and the gallery of what people fit into that line is humbling.

The outlet that breaks the story first and considers taste afterwards, with a documented record of being right.

Reddit's fact firehose, where each post is one verified surprise with the source link attached underneath.

Scanned cereal boxes going back decades, with full career histories for the mascots, maintained purely for its own sake.

The onion router straight from the people who maintain it — the browser download plus a plain-English account of how the relays work.

Text-based crime MMO running since 2004, where the market, the gyms and the prison are all operated by other extremely committed players.

Match-three fused with tower defence, so every swap you make is also the wave you are currently surviving.

Click to place a block and a small algorithm builds a plausible seaside town around it, with no goal of any kind.

Paste a single screenshot and it names the anime, the episode and the exact timestamp. Unreasonably accurate for something free.

Guess the country from a treemap of what it exports, which turns out to be an oddly precise national fingerprint.

Tracks what you have watched across every service and tells you which episode is next in the series you abandoned in March.

Bounces a sentence between English and Japanese until the two versions agree, which they rarely do politely.

The browser strategy game half your school was awake at 3am for, still running, still fundamentally about raiding villages.

Get from one country to another by naming every country in between, with the shortest workable route scoring best.

Medieval village building and tribe politics from 2003, where the real game is coordinating twenty players inside a spreadsheet.

Bridge, euchre, hearts and spades against bots or friends, on a table that behaves the way a real one does.

Send tiny creatures up an infinite tower, die, come back stronger. Years of content behind an interface that gives no quarter.

Raw model output laid out for people who want to read the charts themselves, and the page hurricane watchers keep open all August.

Australia's national archive of newspapers, websites and photographs, digitised back to 1803 and open without an account.

Fly down a rotating tunnel of coloured obstacles quickly enough that your eyes take over the steering from your brain.

Write a Turing machine in a few lines and watch the tape head shuffle back and forth carrying it out.

Plotter art drawn by a virtual turtle in a hundred-odd lines of JavaScript, with everybody's source code on display.

A taxonomy of every storytelling device ever used, cross-linked so densely that leaving takes actual discipline.

The tool behind half the interactive fiction of the past decade, running in the browser and learnable in about twenty minutes.

Practise typing by working through actual novels, so the warm-up leaves you a few pages of Dostoevsky instead of nonsense.

Races you against real people typing the same passage, which is the only known method of making a typing test tense.

A complete free typing course with lessons, tests and games, the sort of thing schools pay for and this one does not charge.

Typing practice on real open-source code, complete with the brackets and semicolons that ruin everyone's average.

Structured typing lessons with a hand diagram that shows precisely which finger you have been cheating with all along.

Old-school pattern library that explains the problem each interface pattern solves before it shows you examples.

The British Library's record of the UK web, collected under legal deposit — including sites their owners deleted years ago.

The community record of Cicada 3301, the recruitment puzzle whose final book has still never been deciphered.

You are an AI told to make paperclips, and you follow that instruction all the way to its conclusion. Four hours, one button to begin.

Uno against bots or friends, with the draw-four arguments fully intact and no cards to lose under the sofa.