Good on a phone

Disposable inbox that self-destructs after ten minutes. Exactly what you want when a download demands an email address first.

A countdown of a thousand small good things, from the cold side of the pillow to popping bubble wrap, written daily for years.

The Myers-Briggs-flavoured test everybody has taken, with a four-letter verdict and profile pages that are unnervingly specific.

The original tile-merging game, written in a weekend and responsible for an enormous amount of lost 2014.

Mahjong solitaire in a dozen layouts with no download and no account, exactly as it was on every family PC in 2004.

Grant Sanderson's maths lessons, plus the written versions of the animations that made linear algebra look like geometry.

Straightforward pool on a proper physics table, against an opponent who punishes a lazy break immediately.

Miniclip's pool game, still the default way to lose imaginary money to a stranger in another country at half past two.

Seventy statements, four political axes and an ideology label at the end. The open-source template for a hundred imitators.

The meme feed that reposts everything eventually, sorted into channels so you can choose your particular poison.

Starts as one button beside a dying fire and quietly becomes something much larger. Best played without reading anything about it first.

Hand-picked, highly rated films that were never blockbusters, filterable by mood and by where you can currently stream them.

Ten sliders — rain, thunder, waves, birds, coffee — mixed on a single page with nothing else on it at all.

Photographic essays on ruined institutions that are far more interested in why the places closed than in the broken glass.

Guided write-ups of the city's empty hospitals, airfields and amusement parks, complete with directions and a note on the fence situation.

Twenty-eight escalating trolley dilemmas that end somewhere very silly, each showing the percentage of people who agreed with you.

Thousands of free electronics tutorials with full wiring diagrams and working code. The gentlest on-ramp to microcontrollers there is.

Waterhole cameras in southern African reserves, running since the nineties, where nothing happens for an hour and then everything does.

Be a cell, eat smaller cells, flee larger ones and split to ambush. The game that invented this entire genre in 2015.

Text adventure with no script at all: the model invents the world as you type at it, and will happily follow you somewhere absurd.

Janelle Shane feeds neural networks recipes, paint names and knitting patterns, then reports the wreckage with real affection.

Buy aircraft, plot routes and slowly discover that fuel price is the only variable that ever really mattered.

Live flight tracking with airport arrival boards and playback of earlier flights, formerly known as RadarBox and still free to browse.

Professional reviews, genre family trees and similar-artist chains inherited from the print era, which is how you get from one band to fifty.

Vast crowd-sourced recipe database where the comments are the actual feature — thousands of people telling you what to change.

Games built here rather than embedded from elsewhere — no ads inside the frame and no third party watching you play.

A visual board for collecting images and ideas, without an algorithm deciding what you should have been collecting instead.

A paused editorial preview that explains the sourcing and publishing controls required before stories return.

Layer rain, wind, waves, fire and café chatter, then set each one to the level you want. Survives being left open all day.

An ambient radio station with no announcers, no adverts and nothing that ever resolves, aimed squarely at falling asleep.

Genuine industrial surplus sold with the best product copy on the internet: lab glassware, small motors, and 400 unexplained springs.

Free woodworking plans with cut lists and costed materials, aimed squarely at people who own exactly one saw.

Type your address and spin the globe back 750 million years to see where that ground sat, and which ocean was sitting on top of it.

AniList's seasonal grid: everything airing this season in one scroll, sortable by popularity, score or start date.

Modern tracker with a genuinely good interface, per-episode progress and an open API a great many other tools build on.

Upload a child's drawing of a person and it finds the limbs, rigs them and makes the figure dance. Research that turned out purely delightful.

Every knot worth knowing, animated frame by frame so you can scrub back and forth until your hands finally get it.

Industry news since 1998, plus an encyclopedia with staff and voice credits that nothing else in the space matches.

Recommendation-led catalogue with if-you-liked-this chains going back to 2001, plus legal streaming links for each title.

Every opening and ending sequence in decent quality, searchable by series or by song. A dangerous tab to open at work.

Multilingual anime, manga and light novel database with unusually careful tagging and full regional release information.

The spaced repetition flashcard system serious learners settle on, with shared decks for nearly every subject.

The prestige-layer masterpiece: reset everything for a multiplier, then reset the resets, until the numbers stop having names.

Seattle's novelty institution: rubber chickens, emergency moustaches and an unreasonable number of items shaped like tinned meat.

Gianni Sarcone's workshop of puzzles and illusions, half optical trickery and half mathematical recreation, running since the 1990s.

Thousands of themed collections built by libraries and museums, each one somebody's deliberate decision about what to keep.

Takes a permanent snapshot of a page on demand, including ones the Wayback Machine will not capture. Useful when a page is about to change.

Botanical infinite zoom drifting through flowers, insects and quiet ruins. Best left running on a second screen.