Good on a phone

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.

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 — hundreds of browser games sorted by type, 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.

Positive news published daily since 1997, back when the idea sounded like a joke rather than a business model.

Castle building and siege warfare with the exact aesthetics of an advert you have definitely been served, and better strategy underneath.

Gigapixel scans from two thousand museums, plus the experiments that let you find your own face in a painting.

Family Fortunes played against Google autocomplete, which turns out to be a bleaker and much funnier opponent than a studio audience.

Small library of ready-made gradients you nudge by dragging the angle, then copy straight into a stylesheet.

Draw a horse, then watch it gallop off to join the herd of terrible horses drawn by everybody else.

Tim Rowett's collection of optical toys and physics oddities, each demonstrated on camera by a man visibly delighted with all of it.

Comic-strip teardowns of real product decisions, each one explaining the psychology behind why it did or did not work.