Safe at your desk

German satirical news delivered with a completely straight face, plus a weekly video bulletin, running since 2008.

The 2007 original that turned maze building into a genre, played across a desktop with the icons still sitting on it.

A graphing calculator good enough that people make art with it — type a function and drag its parameters about.

Photographs of the city's abandoned schools and factories, paired with the records of the people who taught and worked in them.

Alarming research site about a chemical found in tumours, acid rain and every reservoir on earth. The chemical is water.

The original single-player dice conquest game: no accounts, no sound, no explanation, and still a perfect twenty minutes.

An avatar library where you can dial through a dozen illustration styles and copy the result straight out as an image.

A tank shooting polygons for experience, then branching down a surprisingly deep upgrade tree, from the maker of Agar.io.

Paste two blocks of text and get a colour-coded diff back immediately. Also handles PDFs, images and spreadsheets.

One search across thousands of American libraries, archives and museums, with curated exhibitions layered on top.

The same six panels of clip-art dinosaurs every day since 2003, with entirely different words in them each time.

A browsable index of every named dinosaur, with size comparisons and the period each one actually belonged to.

The catalogue of every physical release ever pressed, down to matrix numbers and pressing variants, plus what your copy is worth.

Ankh-Morpork rendered as a text world, with guilds, working shops and an obsessive attention to what Pratchett actually wrote.

Machine learning journal where every paper is an interactive diagram; publication has stopped, the back catalogue has not aged.

Turns any image into one-bit dithered grain, with a choice of classic algorithms and a two-colour palette picker.

Dithering aimed squarely at the chunky, ugly end of the spectrum, with palettes lifted from old hardware.

Serious dithering workbench with dozens of algorithms, custom palettes, live preview and a video mode as well.

Runs a standard or extended check to reveal which servers actually saw your DNS lookups. The quickest way to catch a VPN not doing its job.

A timer that counts how long you manage to do nothing at all. Move the mouse, press a key, or scroll and it starts again from zero.

Crowdsourced content warnings covering a hundred-odd specific triggers, so you can check beforehand rather than find out during.

Mine dogecoin with a shiba inu until you can afford to buy the moon. The year 2014, preserved in fully playable form.

A 1996 US presidential campaign website, still up, still exactly as it was. An accidental museum of early political web design.

Hundreds of dress-up games covering mythology, history and fandoms, drawn by actual artists rather than an asset pipeline.

The deck-building game that invented the genre, officially online, with a free rotating selection of kingdom cards.

An interface that forbids clicking entirely and makes you navigate by hovering, which is far stranger than it sounds.

Pixel canvas designed for thumbs first, fed by a huge stream of daily themed drawings from a mostly Japanese community.

Paste a website address and learn whether it is down for the whole world or only for you. Settles the argument with your router in seconds.

Single-player browser RPG from the AdventureQuest studio, with a long story campaign and jokes aimed squarely at 2007.

Isometric hack-and-slash that runs in the browser and does a competent impression of Diablo with nothing to install.

Team drawing race: two teams, one word, and the first side to guess it takes the round. Faster and shoutier than the alternatives.

Full flowchart, floorplan and network-diagram editor that saves to your own drive and has never once asked anyone for money.

Telephone played with drawings: describe a picture, draw a description, and watch the chain derail over twelve steps.

Move the mouse and flowers, mushrooms and grass sprout underneath it while a music box plays. No tools, no undo, no point.

Draw and guess with a room code, or play solo against the clock on the evenings when nobody answers the group chat.

A directory that has been curating this genre since 2004, including a great many games nobody else bothered to archive.

Short shots of interface design, illustration and branding from designers around the world. A mood board that never quite ends.

One button, one endless right angle, one car sliding off the edge of the world. The purest possible drifting game.

Tune a car, hold the handbrake and score points for angle rather than lap times. The garage is quietly the actual game.

Precise Hindu calendar giving tithi, nakshatra and auspicious timings for any date and location. Astronomically rigorous throughout.

Balance a truck over obstacle courses clearly designed by somebody who has never driven anything at all.

Search without the profile building, plus bang shortcuts that fire your query straight at another site. Type an exclamation and w for Wikipedia.

Yu-Gi-Oh played manually against real opponents, with every card ever printed and no automation to hide your mistakes.

Thirty-two Wordle boards at once, thirty-seven guesses, no mercy. The logical end point of the whole 2022 craze.

JavaScript demos in 140 characters. The gap between how little code there is and what appears is the whole appeal.

A rotating globe with every wind current on Earth drawn as moving lines, and layers underneath for ocean currents, particulates and the jet stream.

Thousands of public webcams pointed at squares, harbours, volcanoes and building sites, some with archives stretching back decades.

Interactive classroom illusions you can drag, toggle and pause, which makes the effects considerably harder to dismiss.