Ten minutes to kill

Where English words came from, sourced and dated, compiled by one man who has been at it since 2000.

Station listings for nearly every country, each with a playlist history so you can identify the track that finished before you looked up.

Scan a barcode and get ingredients, additives and a nutrition score from a database anyone can edit. Wikipedia for groceries.

A hand-drawn library of mix-and-match people, free for anything, and quietly the source of half the internet's illustrations.

Searches around a billion openly licensed images and audio files, with the licence terms attached to every single result.

A sealed glass sphere of water, sand and brine shrimp that you seed and then leave running, ecosystem permitting.

Colourises black-and-white photographs, then lets you steer the result by describing the colours you wanted in words.

Fold a paper plane, throw it, and catch one somebody launched in another country. Nothing else happens, which is the point.

Scroll to unroll an infinite toilet roll and scroll back to wind it up, presented by the artist with a completely straight face.

Claim territory by driving loops around it while everyone else tries to clip your tail before you make it home.

Noughts and crosses, gomoku and Connect Four against a real stranger, matched in about four seconds with no signup.

Race a crowd of runners up a rooftop obstacle course where the only real skill is jumping at the right half-second.

Every letter on the keyboard fires a sound and a matching shape, and mashing the whole row is the correct way to use it.

A big set of free PDF tools in the browser: merge, split, compress, convert and sign documents without creating an account first.

Penalty shootouts through a whole tournament, against a keeper who reads your run-up better than you would like.

Draw a circle with the mouse and get scored on it to one decimal place. Nobody in recorded history has stopped after one attempt.

Draw a circle with one unbroken stroke and get scored on how round it actually was. Nobody beats 97% on a trackpad.

A hand-drawn character builder in the Open Peeps style, producing an avatar that does not look machine-generated.

Sixteen questions sort you into one of Pew's nine American political groups, with a decade of real survey data behind every one.

Puts your face on billboards, banknotes and museum walls using several hundred templates. Aggressively 2009.

Airtight's glitch lab, stacking VHS tracking errors, pixel sorting and RGB shift over a photo, a clip or your webcam.

A Japanese platform hosting tens of thousands of illustrator-made avatar makers, each one in a completely different style.

Names a pixel size and asks you to drag a box exactly that big. Nobody is as good at this as they assume.

Grid, palette, mouse. The whole tool fits on one page and you are drawing about three seconds after it loads.

Feed it a photograph and it hands back a pixel-art version, with block size and palette entirely under your control.

Type in the thing you are stressed about, watch it shrink into a distant star over sixty seconds, then close the tab.

Live flight tracking with an augmented-reality view, for pointing a phone at whatever just went over the garden and naming it.

A plain, fast game server that has outlived every redesign trend since 2001 and still hosts chess, draughts and mahjong.

Type a phrase and watch every film clip in which somebody says it, cut back to back until the words stop meaning anything.

Put your cursor anywhere on the page and it finds a photograph of a person pointing at exactly that spot.

A noughts-and-crosses grid where every square needs a Pokemon matching two criteria at once, scored on how obscure your picks were.

Clean, fast and mobile-first, with a front page that reads more like a curated shelf than a dump of everything uploaded.

Twenty-five minute cycles with a running log of what you spent each one on, in case you need the evidence later.

A pomodoro timer with a task list bolted on, which is roughly the entire feature set anybody actually uses.

An eternal-summer radio station dressed as an old Macintosh desktop, playing the soundtrack to a holiday you never actually took.

A British gossip newsletter of blind items and pop trivia, running since 2000 and still legally very careful.

Click the cat, the cat pops, and every click is added to your country's total in a global leaderboard nobody asked for.

Age pyramids for any country from 1950 to 2100, which settles most demographic arguments in a single shape.

The sequel, with proper solid objects and adjustable gravity, and a public save gallery going back well over a decade.

A shelf of harmless fake screens — cracked display, virus alert, retro desktop — meant for a colleague's unattended laptop.

A fake desktop of virus warnings, satellite feeds and password crackers, all keyboard-mashable in full screen.

Full-screen fake terminals, fake updates and fake system alerts. Harmless, closeable with Escape, and very funny on a colleague's screen.

A free browser extension from the EFF that learns which trackers follow you from site to site and blocks them, with no lists to manage.

The RPG with the player removed: choose a race, then watch the bars fill for years. Still the sharpest joke about the genre.

The colour-word interference test as the real psychology experiment rather than a quiz-site imitation, with your data at the end.

A pug in a rug, plus a timer counting exactly how long you have now watched the pug be in the rug.

A cat purr you tune by size, mood and breathing rate, for people who work better with a notional cat on the desk.

The Only Connect connecting wall in thousands of user-made versions: sixteen clues, four groups, two and a half minutes.