Ten minutes to kill

Millions of product manuals as PDFs, for the appliance whose paperwork went in the recycling back in 2011.

Every open source project plotted as a landmass, with related repositories clustering into continents you can pan across.

Drops you on a random road somewhere on Earth in Street View and leaves you to work out where you are, or simply wander off down it.

Pomodoro, custom and kitchen-timer modes with a shareable link, so a whole team can run the same twenty-five minutes.

Live positions of the world's merchant fleet, container ships down to tugs, most vessels with photographs taken by shore spotters.

A meticulous recreation of the falling green glyphs, with settings for every version of the effect across the films.

Live map of which McDonald's ice cream machines are broken, built by repeatedly adding a sundae to a cart. Petty, rigorous, brilliant.

Runs an image through the exact stack of saturation, JPEG damage and stray emoji that makes a meme look reposted eight times.

Hundreds of matching-pair memory games plus Simon-style sequences, scaled from toddler difficulty to genuinely unpleasant.

Vocabulary drills built around clips of native speakers saying the phrase in an actual street.

Weighted average of professional reviews on a 0-100 scale, with the user score shown separately when the two disagree loudly.

Multi-model forecasts with a meteogram showing how confident the models actually are, which most weather apps quietly decline to admit.

Search the web with the top million most popular sites removed. What is left is the internet nobody bothers optimising for.

Every train on the Tokyo rail network moving in real time across a 3D map, with the aircraft landing at Haneda thrown in.

The 2000s browser giant, now mostly a mobile publisher but still hosting 8 Ball Pool and a shelf of its own history.

A search engine that crawls the web with its own bot rather than renting results from the giants, and does not track who is searching.

Search any molecule and spin its three-dimensional structure, with spectra and crystal data alongside it.

The typing test that made typing tests beautiful — endlessly configurable, instantly readable and quietly addictive.

Live cameras on the kelp forest, the aviary and the open sea tank, plus a sea otter feed that has ended many working afternoons.

Filters every streaming catalogue at once by genre, rating and service, then hands you exactly one thing to watch.

One piano keyboard shared by everybody currently online, producing either a Chopin nocturne or an immediate car crash.

Click a dial-up modem, a Nokia ringtone or a VHS rewinder and remember precisely where you were standing at the time.

Type a band and get a cloud of other bands, positioned by how often listeners like both. Crude, ancient and still weirdly effective.

A non-profit, open-source search engine with its own index, curated by volunteers. Results feel nothing like the big engines, which is the point.

Noughties television as it actually was, which is more unsettling than the eighties version because you remember most of it.

A simulated television set showing nothing but 1980s programming and adverts, complete with channel dial and static between stations.

The same idea moved a decade forward. Flip channels through the nineties and land somewhere between a cartoon and a cereal advert.

The largest soundboard on the web with a search box, which makes it either a toy or a workplace hazard.

Type a surname and get where it came from, what it originally meant and where in the world it still clusters.

Active fire and thermal anomaly detections from NASA satellites, updated within hours of each pass and quietly sobering at continental zoom.

The official live stream, which for long stretches is simply Earth turning below the space station.

The official Atlantic and Pacific hurricane advisories, cones of uncertainty and discussion notes written in plain prose by duty forecasters.

Wordle for equations: eight tiles holding one arithmetic statement that has to balance as well as being correct.

The link at the end of every bait-and-switch since 2007, and the reason nobody fully trusts a shortened URL.

UK spoof news updated several times a day, best read as running commentary on whatever is currently going wrong.

A morning briefing of good stories, written for people who want a news habit that does not ruin breakfast.

A permanent vaporwave station with fake adverts, a virtual room and album art on a CRT, running continuously for about a decade.

A ninja, flexing, to a backing track, at a frame rate suggesting nobody involved was trying especially hard.

The thirty-minute aurora forecast as an oval of probability drawn over the poles, which is the only honest way to plan a night out for it.

Rain, wind, fan and coffee-shop loops you layer into one background mix, then save as a preset for the rest of the week.

Fast, minimal tracker that pings you the moment a followed episode airs. Open source and deliberately kept lightweight.

One well-sourced strange story per weekday, told at exactly the length of a cup of coffee.

The US National Weather Service radar, unstyled and authoritative, with warning polygons drawn straight over the raw returns.

The pop-tart cat, the rainbow and the song, with a counter for how many seconds of your life you have handed over.

Physically modelled sea you can retune — wind speed, swell, choppiness — rendering waves that behave properly.

A cabinet of small physics experiments — cloth, water, ragdolls, particles — built by one developer who simply kept going.

A million checkboxes shared by everyone at once. Ticking them was pointless right up until people started writing messages in binary.

One minute of footage from a park somewhere in the world, matched to the exact minute you happen to be watching.