Good on a phone

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.

Free cryptic, quick and Everyman crosswords every day, plus the setter blogs that explain each diabolical clue afterwards.

A daily video game identified from progressively less obscure screenshots, with six guesses and a genuinely cruel first frame.

The official register of the longest, fastest and most improbable things people have done entirely on purpose.

A boarding-school story with robots, forest gods and a plot that has been quietly paying things off since 2005.

Daily coverage of hardware projects that had no commercial reason to exist. Reliably the most inventive corner of the web.

Grey text on beige, no images, and the best comment threads anywhere about how technical things actually work. Search covers twenty years.

A weekly, hand-picked digest of the best Hacker News links, with an archive of past issues you can browse straight from the site.

Generates blobs, waves, stacked layers and low-poly grids as SVG, all of them tweakable and all free to export.

One word of reassurance about the Large Hadron Collider, maintained since 2008 and still, reassuringly, saying no.

Football management one week at a time since 1997, with a transfer market and an economy run entirely by other managers.

Type an email address and find out which breaches it turned up in. Troy Hunt's index now covers billions of leaked accounts.

The cult's own website, left exactly as it was in 1997 and still quietly maintained. A sobering artefact rather than a joke.

Tells you exactly when the space station will pass over your garden, and which direction to look.

Falling blocks rotated onto a hexagon and sped up, which sounds like a novelty and turns out to be genuinely hard.

Placeholder text made of artisanal nonsense, optionally cut with real Latin for clients who prefer not to notice.

Old photographs pinned to the exact street corner where they were taken, fading into the modern view behind.

Reaction time, sequence memory, the chimp test and verbal memory, each scored against millions of other people's attempts.

Allie Brosh's illustrated essays, including the two on depression that remain the best thing written about it.

The lolcat archive that taught the internet its first grammar, still posting captioned animals two decades later.

Every known way to lace and tie a shoe, diagrammed by one Australian for over two decades, including a knot he invented himself.

Several hundred psychological tests, from serious personality inventories to deeply unserious ones, all free and all instant.

Overlays one country on another to scale, then works out how your life expectancy, income and odds of various things would change there.

Mocks up a screenshot of a conversation that never happened, for jokes and design mock-ups rather than anything serious.

Catalogue, reviews and play links for four decades of interactive fiction, maintained by people who take the form extremely seriously.

Free illustrated repair manuals for phones, laptops, cars and appliances, plus teardowns that name and shame every glued-in battery.

Popular science headlines with the volume turned up, handy for the fact you half-remember reading somewhere.

A philosophy department's catalogue of illusions, each with what it is, what it demonstrates, and the argument still going about it.

Merge, split, compress, rotate, sign and convert PDFs from a single page. Covers nearly everything Acrobat charges a subscription for.

The canonical crowd-ranked list of 250 films, weighted to resist review bombing. A reliable way to spot the gap in your viewing.

Every meme template with the text boxes already in the right places, and no watermark once you find the setting.

Catalogue of impossible figures, ambiguous objects and Escher-adjacent architecture, kept up by one very devoted collector.

Post-apocalyptic comedy RPG with turn-based fights, base building and a tone somewhere between Douglas Adams and a mild fever.

A calendar of every conjunction, eclipse and meteor shower coming up, with charts drawn for your own location.

Every plant and animal anybody has photographed and posted, mapped, with a community that will identify your mystery beetle within hours.

Dress beatboxers in different outfits and each one adds a loop, building a full a cappella track by drag and drop.

A sheet of bubble wrap that never runs out. Pop with a click or drag across a row, and it refills the moment you finish.

Combine two things to make a third, forever, until you have coaxed a language model into inventing something absurd.

David McCandless's poster-grade infographics on everything from relative drug harms to the meanings of colours.

One big button, one badum-tss, for punchlines that need help landing in a meeting nobody is enjoying.

Step-by-step build guides for anything from a bookshelf to a plasma cutter, written by the people who actually made the thing.