Good on a phone

Two dozen SVG generators in one place — noise, grain, blobs, dots, gradients, mesh — all exportable and all free.

British gift shop with a taste for the daft and mildly rude, plus the occasional genuinely good bit of kit hidden among it.

A toy about synchronisation — a few hundred blinking dots that agree on a rhythm with no conductor anywhere.

A fortnightly digest of measurable global progress on disease, energy and conservation, with a source for every claim.

A flag revealed six squares at a time, which sounds straightforward until you meet the fourth consecutive tricolour.

The pipe game its own creator pulled from the app stores for being too addictive, rebuilt and still ruining afternoons.

Flight tracking with the operational detail attached: delays, diversions, taxi times and the filed route rather than a tidy curve.

Every direct flight from any airport in the world drawn on one map, which is the fastest way to plan an unreasonable journey.

Every aircraft in the sky right now on one map. Click any of them for the route, the aircraft type and how far it still has to go.

Nathan Yau's long-running blog on charts done well and badly, plus his own studies of how a day gets spent.

Three dishes a day and you name the country that cooks them, which teaches more about world cuisine than it means to.

Plant a virtual tree that dies if you pick up your phone, which works on far more adults than anybody wants to admit.

City building from the Stone Age to the near future, with a tactical battle grid and guilds fighting over a shared continent.

Street-level archaeology of the city — old lamp posts, painted signs and vanished railways, walked and documented since 1999.

Native speakers pronouncing individual words in hundreds of languages, for when a phonetic spelling is not enough.

Home-video horrors rescued from charity shops and skips, curated by two men with an unhealthy commitment to the format.

Six stills from one film, revealed one at a time. Getting it from the first frame is the only score really worth having.

Properly licensed free downloads curated by radio stations, which is how you stop losing your videos to copyright claims.

The 1978 electronic memory toy rebuilt faithfully in a browser tab, still beating most grown adults somewhere around level twelve.

Answer vocabulary questions and the ad revenue goes to the UN World Food Programme. Running since 2007 and still counting grains.

A search engine that strips every result down to plain HTML so it can be read on a genuinely ancient computer. Also very fast.

Every symbol, alphabet and text decoration you might want to paste somewhere, organised well enough to find one.

A million questions written and edited by volunteers since 1999, filed under categories nobody would ever think to commission.

A daily gleaning of curiosities, lateral puzzles and pleasing coincidences, kept up since 2005 without fuss.

A directory of AI tools with categories, pricing filters and short reviews, handy for finding a free option for a specific job.

Long-form expeditions into Japan's abandoned mines, hotels and theme parks, written by somebody who actually climbed in.

The French national library's digital collection — manuscripts, maps, newspapers and photographs, millions of items deep.

A shelf of room-code party games — spy, drawing, word association, trivia — all free, all in one place, none needing an app.

Name the video game from a blurred cover, then a screenshot, then artwork. New puzzle daily and several modes to lose at.

The full arcade: dozens of browser games sorted by genre, all playable immediately with nothing to install.

A large casual portal aimed squarely at people who want a match-three game and no further conversation about it.

Broken telephone with drawings: a sentence becomes a picture becomes a sentence, and the album at the end is the whole payoff.

A browsable restoration of the GeoCities neighbourhoods, so you can wander into Area51 or SunsetStrip the way people once did.

Geometry, algebra and calculus tools in one place, plus a huge shared library of constructions others have built.

A three-by-three grid of geographic categories where you name one country per cell and get scored on how obscure it was.

The game that made the genre: dropped into Street View, guess where on the globe you are. The free tier is thin these days.

Rhythm platformer in which a cube jumps in time with the music, and every death teaches you exactly one frame of timing.

Plain page of every emoji, grouped and clickable, for the machines that have no emoji keyboard worth using.

Directory of the emptied-out settlements of the American West, one short paragraph and one faded photograph at a time.

A search engine for animated GIFs recovered from GeoCities. Type any word and receive several spinning versions of it.

The GIF search engine everything else plugs into, still the fastest route to the exact reaction you have in mind.

Long-running newsletter and link hoard for glitch art — tools, artists and the occasional genuinely disquieting find.

One mystery country a day, guessed by warmth — every wrong answer shades the globe a little closer to the right one.

Name three bands you like, then answer yes or no to its guesses until it works out what you are actually in the mood for.

Red-carpet criticism written with real fashion knowledge and jokes aimed at the outfit rather than the person in it.

Curated wall of the best-designed sites on the internet, filterable by type and updated relentlessly.

Drive a golf ball absurd distances, upgrade the swing, repeat until the ball is leaving the atmosphere entirely.

Good news with a nudge attached — every story arrives alongside something you could actually do about it.