Good on a phone

An encyclopedia of the world's writing systems, including the invented, the extinct and the barely attested.

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.

Screenshots of archived GeoCities pages posted automatically, one after another, as a rolling portrait of the amateur web.

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

The English-speaking world's Go server, where correspondence games run for weeks and somebody always explains why your move was bad.

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

Hand-curated index of several thousand active blogs, sorted by subject, for when you want writing rather than a feed.

A daily index of the free courses, audiobooks, films and ebooks scattered across the rest of the internet.

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

A catalogue page for every book ever published, a good many of them borrowable straight in the browser.

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

Spin a globe, drop on a city, hear whatever its local radio is playing right now. Works best somewhere you have never been.

Open-source successor to Territorial.io: push borders across a world map, form alliances and break them at precisely the right moment.

Open-source emoji set drawn by design students, free to use, and in several places noticeably better than the defaults.

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.

Oxford's open charts on poverty, energy, health and war, with the underlying data downloadable from every single one.

John McLeod's encyclopedia of card game rules, covering every regional variant of everything and settling every dispute.

The New York Post's gossip column, now its own site, still running on restaurant tip-offs and unnamed sources.

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

Build sundaes to order under mounting time pressure, the most polished entry in a series about the dignity of service work.

The original of the Papa's series, where tips fund your upgrades and customers absolutely notice an undercooked base.

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.

Drag mildly biased shapes around a grid and watch a segregated neighbourhood assemble itself without anyone intending it.

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

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

The longest-running games comic on the web, three strips a week since 1998, plus the posts that built an industry.

Random generators for anything, built from plain text lists you can fork and edit yourself. Thousands of community ones already exist.

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

A crowd-voted encyclopaedia arguing over the MBTI and enneagram type of every fictional character and public figure in existence.

Proper trait questionnaires with the scoring shown, rather than a quiz that decides you are a golden retriever.

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

Every adoptable animal in a hundred thousand shelters, searchable by postcode, which is dangerous browsing after 11pm.

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

Colorado's library of physics, chemistry and maths simulations, used in classrooms everywhere and free to meddle with.

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

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

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

Put one worry into a star and watch it shrink into the distance over sixty seconds. Faintly ridiculous, reliably effective.

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

Sprite editor with layers and animation frames, wrapped in an unusually friendly community gallery of other people's work.

Two editors in one — a quick one and a layered one — both free in the browser with the usual filters and masks.

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

Daily roundups of the funniest things posted elsewhere, a genre this one has been working since 2009.