Collection
Ten minutes to kill
Every site here pays off inside a short break and lets you walk away cleanly — no save file, no streak to protect, nothing that needs finishing.
514 sites · page 2 of 11
Plays the notification sounds of Slack, email and Teams on a loop so it sounds like somebody urgently needs you.
- <1 min
- Sound on
A breathing bubble with adjustable pace, sitting on a page that mercifully does not require the app to work.
Type any web feature and see which browsers support it, version by version, alongside how many people actually use each one.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Turns a snippet of code into a tidy image with your choice of theme, font and window frame. The tool behind a lot of shared code screenshots.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Cut-out cats rain down and bounce off the bottom of the screen, and you can grab one and fling it at the others.
- <1 min
- Desktop
A free endpoint that returns one cat fact per request, which is how every cat-facts prank bot ever built gets built.
- 2 min
Anime avatar makers with genuinely good line art, including versions that output something usable as a profile picture.
Chess tactics training with a rating that goes down, plus an endgame trainer that reveals exactly how much you do not know.
- 2 min
The default chess address for most of the planet, with a bot for every skill level and puzzles that will quietly humble you.
- 2 min
A chihuahua rotating to a dance track, which was apparently a complete website idea in 2013 and somehow still is.
- <1 min
- Sound on
The offline dinosaur from Chrome's error page, playable while you still have a perfectly good connection.
- <1 min
Five photographs, one question each: what year was this taken? Points scale with how close you land, and the cars always give it away.
Renders every road in any city as white lines on black and nothing else, which turns an ordinary street plan into unexpectedly good art.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Paint over the tourist, the bin or the power line and it fills in whatever should have been behind them.
- <1 min
Sixty seconds to forge the Mona Lisa with a mouse, then a pixel-by-pixel score telling you exactly how badly it went.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Curated stumble button that sends you somewhere good rather than somewhere random, with categories if you are feeling fussy.
Fill-in-the-blank sentences mined from real corpora, aimed squarely at people who have outgrown the beginner apps.
NASA ephemeris data, brutal one-line notifications and a design language everyone copied. Astrology delivered entirely deadpan.
The murmur of a café without the queue or the cost, built on research that moderate background noise helps creative work.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Hand-picked four-colour palettes posted daily and sorted by mood, with none of a generator's randomness.
- <1 min
Palette generator trained on photographs and films, so the colours it suggests look like they came from somewhere real.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Sixteen words, four hidden groups, four mistakes allowed. The traps are the entire point and they are very carefully set.
- 2 min
Generates hero images — gradients, particles, triangles, topography — at whatever resolution you need, free to download.
- <1 min
The site every school network forgot to block, still hosting Run 3, Fireboy and Watergirl and almost no actual mathematics.
- <1 min
Chrome, flames and bevelled gradients — the 2003 logo generator, still online and still producing exactly that.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Hit the space bar for a five-colour palette, lock the ones you like, hit it again. The whole tool is that loop.
- <1 min
Nest and feeder cams run by the Cornell Lab, with ornithologists in the chat explaining what the bird is doing and why it matters.
One button that adds unicorns and rainbows to any web page, solving a problem that has never once been reported.
- <1 min
Upload any file and receive a genuinely corrupted version back. Built for missing deadlines, used mostly for art.
- <1 min
The same premise with different flavours of damage — choose the format and how thoroughly you want it ruined.
- <1 min
The EFF's test showing how uniquely identifiable your browser is from fonts, plugins and screen size alone. Most people are one in millions.
- 2 min
- Desktop
The biggest browser arcade going, with genuinely decent HTML5 ports and a search that mostly finds the game you meant.
- <1 min
A few hundred browser escape rooms in one filtered shelf, all running in the tab with nothing to install and nothing to buy.
- 2 min
Translates a cron expression into plain English as you type it, then tells you when it will next fire. Ends a very specific argument.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Frogger with better manners: hop a chicken across roads, rivers and railway lines until the inevitable lorry.
- 2 min
Where every cruise ship in the world currently is, with deck plans and itineraries attached, for reasons entirely your own.
Chain encoders and classical ciphers together and watch text transform between formats at each step.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Builds a gradient visually and hands over the CSS, including the awkward multi-stop and radial cases.
- <1 min
Sugar-coated filler text for wireframes, with sliders for exactly how sweet and how long the nonsense should be.
- <1 min
Several hundred cipher, code and puzzle solvers in one place, from Caesar shifts to crossword pattern matching.
- <1 min
Fast browser shooter with no account and no download: click, spawn, and get eliminated by somebody considerably better.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Mix rain, keyboards, seagulls and a fireplace into one soundscape, then hand the whole mix to somebody as a single link.
- <1 min
- Sound on
A graphing calculator good enough that people make art with it — type a function and drag its parameters about.
- <1 min
Alarming research site about a chemical found in tumours, acid rain and every reservoir on earth. The chemical is water.
- 2 min
An avatar library where you can dial through a dozen illustration styles and copy the result straight out as an image.
- <1 min
A tank shooting polygons for experience, then branching down a surprisingly deep upgrade tree, from the maker of Agar.io.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Paste two blocks of text and get a colour-coded diff back immediately. Also handles PDFs, images and spreadsheets.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Turns any image into one-bit dithered grain, with a choice of classic algorithms and a two-colour palette picker.
- 2 min
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Ten minutes to kill: questions
How many sites are in “Ten minutes to kill”?
514 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 10 of them are AltF originals that run right here.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
509 of the 514 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
371 of 514 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 512 are safe for work and 447 work with the sound off.