Good on a phone

The Portuguese web archive, notable for full-text search across its whole history rather than only address lookup.

The preprint server where most physics, maths and computer science appears long before a journal touches it.

Drop an asteroid of your chosen size on any address and read back the fireball, wind speed and earthquake radius it makes.

Weekly writing on current transits that assumes you want the mechanics rather than the vibes. Unusually technical for the genre.

Generates a genuinely handsome natal chart and flags the rarer patterns, with celebrity charts on hand to compare against.

Free birth charts, synastry and transit calculators with more configuration options than most paid software. No account required.

Susan Miller's famously long monthly forecasts — several thousand words per sign, published without fail since 1995.

One astronomy image a day since 1995, each with a paragraph from an actual astronomer and an archive going back decades.

Long-running Vedic astrology portal with free kundli generation, matchmaking and a daily panchang in several languages.

The AstroTwins' horoscopes and explainers, including a decent plain-English guide to what a transit actually is.

A gazetteer of the world's odd corners — bone chapels, abandoned observatories, restaurants built inside caves.

Draw a wonky shape and it offers professional illustrations of what it thinks you meant. Ruthlessly effective on anyone who cannot draw.

Thousands of educational films saved from the skip — driver safety, dating advice, duck and cover — digitised by one collector.

A cheerful cartoon avatar generator in one fixed illustration style, endlessly recombined and free to use anywhere.

A straightforward cartoon portrait builder with vector output, useful for when a real profile photo is genuinely not an option.

Two decades of other people's terrible family portraits, submitted willingly and captioned by the people in them.

The sister site, strong on anime and historical portrait makers, with an unreasonable and very welcome number of hair options.

Backgammon against ranked humans, with an analysis pass afterwards that quantifies precisely how reckless your doubles were.

Lorem ipsum made entirely of cured meats, for mock-ups where nobody was going to read the filler text anyway.

Filter by genre, format and city to find records sold directly by the people who made them, with full streams before you buy anything.

One song revealed a single instrument at a time, six guesses, one puzzle a day. Needs headphones and a decent musical memory.

Minimalist colour puzzle rooms — yellow, blue, red — where every level teaches you a rule the game never states out loud.

One-button basketball in which the players, the ball and the court are all changed at random between points, deliberately.

Two-on-two street basketball stripped back to dunking, blocking and a shot meter you will consistently misjudge.

Thousands of recipes in metric with honest timings and star ratings left by people who genuinely cooked the thing.

Eight hours on the networks that existed before the internet reached homes, released free by the person who made it.

Photo editor and collage maker aimed squarely at people who want a decent result without learning anything first.

A company worth hundreds of billions serves a homepage of plain blue links, unchanged since the 1990s and quietly proud of it.

Annual contest in which vision scientists compete to fool you, with every finalist since 2005 still watchable.

Maths explained by intuition first and formulas second, by someone who clearly resented how he was taught it.

India's monuments, crafts and regional history laid out as something you explore rather than something you revise.

The personality model psychologists actually use, in a clean 120-question version with a proper breakdown of every facet.

Centuries of natural history books scanned page by page, including illustrations nobody has looked at in decades.

Anonymous celebrity riddles where readers do the detective work in the comments and are occasionally proved right.

Community for adding glitter, sparkles and animated hearts to photographs, still busily active long after the trend died.

Drag four blobs up and down and they sing genuine four-part harmony, trained on real opera singers, always in key.

Browser Minecraft with party modes bolted on — parkour, bed wars, one-block survival — and multiplayer that joins in one click.

Several hundred properly licensed board games with the rules enforced for you, so nobody argues about whether that move was legal.

The cat plays whatever key you press, on bongos, a keyboard or a full drum kit. Peak internet, and still maintained.

Endless listicles of art, design mishaps and comment-section drama, engineered to eat a lunch break whole.

The original boredom portal, still sorting thousands of time-wasters into categories with no discernible editorial filter.

Code-breaking tools and a cipher identifier for when you have a string of nonsense and no idea what it is.

Plain, well-sorted illusion collection with the explanation directly underneath each one, from café walls to impossible triangles.

Tens of thousands of riddles, brain teasers and lateral thinking problems submitted by users since 1999.

Dual n-back, the working-memory drill psychologists keep arguing about, implemented properly and charted over time.

People staple bread to trees and photograph it. There is no deeper explanation available and no sign of it stopping.

Where the bridge world actually plays: free tables at every hour, tournaments, and teaching rooms of remarkable patience.

The write-draw-write chain game that predates the current crop, still running, still free and still producing pure nonsense.