Good on a phone

Rain radar for most of the world with a past-and-future loop, which answers the question of whether to leave now in about four seconds.

Half an hour of rain and distant thunder on a loop, running since before background noise was a productivity category.

A library of specific, doable kindness ideas and the research on why doing them helps the doer as much as the recipient.

The obsessive's music database, where every release is rated, charted and argued over by people with extremely firm opinions.

A snarkier reference work covering pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and the people making a living from them.

Thousands of marketing emails collected and searchable, which is the only sane way to go about designing one.

Every train on the British network with the signalling data attached: which loop it was held in, where it lost four minutes and why.

David Byrne's magazine about things that are demonstrably working somewhere, reported at length rather than as a listicle.

Women's magazine parody with headlines observed so precisely that they read as criticism rather than jokes.

Wathan and Schoger's rules for making things look designed when you are not, in fact, a designer.

Reaction time, visual memory, number span and typing speed, each scored against everyone else who has taken it.

Cuts the background out of a photo in about five seconds, stray hairs included. Free at web resolution, no account needed.

Finds your nearest free community workshop where volunteers help you fix the thing instead of replacing it. Thousands worldwide now.

Pixel American football hiding a full franchise manager behind six-second passing plays. Has ruined more workdays than it should have.

Translations shown inside real bilingual sentences, so you can see which option a person would actually use.

Rhymes, near rhymes, synonyms and usage examples — quietly the best tool available to anyone writing anything.

A hundred yes-or-no questions about things you may have done, counted downward from 100. A student rite of passage since the 1980s.

The definitive index of American roadside oddities: the giant fibreglass animals, the museums devoted to exactly one thing.

Two-button duel on a rooftop where recoil, rather than aim, decides which of you falls off the building first.

Sandwiches rotating slowly on a loop, under a tagline that reads simply, and accurately, that's it.

The percentage that launched a thousand arguments — the share of critics who were positive, which is not an average score.

Tells you the best three minutes to leave for the toilet during any film, and summarises exactly what you missed. Absurd, and it works.

The Cube Escape series in full and free — bleak Dutch point-and-click rooms with a lake, a lot of birds and a plot you assemble sideways.

Live cameras on pandas, penguins, apes and elephants, with keepers wandering into shot at feeding time and narrating as they go.

Falling-sand physics with fire, water, plants and lava, plus a public gallery of what everybody else set alight.

Daily gag strips about science, philosophy and human awfulness, each hiding an extra panel behind the red button.

Reverse image search tuned for illustration: hand it a cropped screenshot and it names the artist and the original post.

Conservation campaign for a cephalopod that lives in trees, used for over twenty years to teach children about checking sources.

Drag one slider from quantum foam to the cosmic web, with every object in between labelled at its true size.

Find one to twenty-five scattered across a grid, in order, against the clock. The standard peripheral-vision and attention drill.

Collaborative fiction dressed as containment paperwork for anomalous objects, written by thousands of people in one clinical deadpan.

Rough sketch in, finished image out, with the result following your actual lines rather than politely ignoring them.

Converts your scrolling into real distance and tells you what you have just passed — a giraffe, the Eiffel Tower, low Earth orbit.

Indexes only independent personal websites whose owners submitted them. No content farms, because there is nothing there to farm.

You are a colony ship AI choosing which disasters to absorb, and every run ends with a summary of how badly humanity settled.

The original semantic-distance guessing game, noticeably harder than its descendants and considerably more humbling.

Word association against a machine: type anything semantically close to the target and the block clears. Tetris rules, meaning as the mechanic.

Recipes that explain the science first and then tell you what to do. The food-lab pieces are why it has the reputation it has.

Random design briefs with a countdown attached, for when the problem is not skill but having nothing to work on.

A daily high-resolution photograph from the early twentieth century, usually with commenters identifying the buildings.

Ragdoll obstacle course whose entire design goal is taking your stickman apart in an inventive new way each level.

Editorially curated short films, each with a proper write-up explaining why it was chosen, which is why the hit rate stays high.

Symmetrical generative art that blooms under the cursor, which everybody who touches it turns into a wallpaper factory.

Forty logic puzzles on one page, each generated fresh and each solvable by pure reasoning. The interface is ancient and it does not matter.

A better-drawn take on the guess-the-doodle format, with more brushes, custom word lists and rooms that hold a large group.

Draw the word, guess everyone else's, share one link with the group. The default browser party game, and deservedly so.

The world's largest supplier of real and replica skulls, browsable by species, which is educational and mildly alarming in equal parts.

Live HD cameras on piazzas, beaches and ski slopes across Europe and beyond, which is the closest a browser tab gets to a day trip.