Good on a phone

Daily tips on doing ordinary things slightly better, running since 2005 and still occasionally genuinely surprising.

Hundreds of small text translators — pirate, medieval, wingdings, uwu — plus a builder for making your own.

Read and listen to real material while tapping unknown words, which quietly become your review deck.

Wikipedia's running audit of the things almost everyone believes and almost nobody has ever checked.

Wikipedia's index of its own indexes, which is either a long-running joke or the purest expression of the site.

Start with four elements and work towards seven hundred, most of which are jokes you only understand on arrival.

Cameras pointed at geysers, glaciers, harbours and whichever volcano is currently misbehaving, plus a northern lights feed in winter.

Thousands of taper-recorded live concerts released with the bands' blessing, going back to the reel-to-reel era and free to stream.

Daily science news with a weakness for the strange finds — mummies, deep sea oddities, cosmic near misses.

Live air traffic control audio from towers around the world, so you can listen to a controller sequencing arrivals into Heathrow while you work.

Seasonal chart of everything currently airing, with countdowns to the next episode and which service is carrying it.

Analogue horror shaped like a small-town TV station's broadcast archive, including the night it advised everyone to look up.

The endless study-beats stream that turned into a genre, plus the label archive behind the girl who never stops revising.

A looping animated café with lofi streams and rain sliders, built to be left open in a corner of the screen all day.

The canonical placeholder text, plus the Cicero passage it was cut from and an explanation of what it says.

Thousands of curated palettes, from Game Boy green to 64-colour monsters, each downloadable in every format going.

The looser, stranger sibling of the main lost media wiki, with more speculation and considerably more unresolved threads.

The best-known brain-training subscription, with a free daily set of games and rather a lot of graphs about your own decline.

The official Escher archive: the impossible staircases, the tessellations, and his own notes on how he worked them out.

Korean home cooking taught with video for everything, including how to make the kimchi rather than quietly buy a jar of it.

One button, one progress bar, and the firm assurance that everything is now OK, which beats the alternative.

Everyone captions the same image, then votes on the best one. Rounds are short and a group works out its own humour quickly.

The maker movement's own magazine: projects, tool reviews and the long-running argument about what counts as making something.

Generate a fake newspaper clipping, a talking animation or a ransom note. The 2005 internet, rebuilt so it still works.

Vintage photographs of shopping centres in their fountains-and-ferns prime, scanned from postcards and other people's family albums.

Millions of product manuals as PDFs, for the appliance whose paperwork went in the recycling back in 2011.

An index deliberately built to favour text-heavy non-commercial pages. Ranking that punishes ad load instead of rewarding it.

Pomodoro, custom and kitchen-timer modes with a shareable link, so a whole team can run the same twenty-five minutes.

Live positions of the world's merchant fleet, container ships down to tugs, most vessels with photographs taken by shore spotters.

Live map of which McDonald's ice cream machines are broken, built by repeatedly adding a sundae to a cart. Petty, rigorous, brilliant.

Scanned film and broadcasting trade magazines going back to 1904, searchable in full text. The industry writing about itself, live.

A platform where creators publish their own dress-up games, which is largely how the genre survived the death of Flash.

Old School RuneScape's skill grind distilled into a pure idle game, with a free browser version that genuinely never ends.

Runs an image through the exact stack of saturation, JPEG damage and stray emoji that makes a meme look reposted eight times.

The Star Trek wiki, maintained with the rigour of a national archive and roughly the same word count.

Hundreds of matching-pair memory games plus Simon-style sequences, scaled from toddler difficulty to genuinely unpleasant.

Vocabulary drills built around clips of native speakers saying the phrase in an actual street.

Trivia and origin stories written for the sort of person who reads the plaque next to the exhibit.

Weighted average of professional reviews on a 0-100 scale, with the user score shown separately when the two disagree loudly.

Multi-model forecasts with a meteogram showing how confident the models actually are, which most weather apps quietly decline to admit.

Name every station on a city's metro map from memory, and find out how many lines you use daily without ever reading.

Long-running blog of illusions and visual puzzles, from classic ambiguous figures to whichever dress the internet is arguing about.

Search the web with the top million most popular sites removed. What is left is the internet nobody bothers optimising for.

Proper Minesweeper with leaderboards, no-guess boards and enough statistics to prove you are worse at it than you thought.

Proper miniature golf courses with believable putting physics and no time pressure applied at any point.

The 2000s browser giant, now mostly a mobile publisher but still hosting 8 Ball Pool and a shelf of its own history.

Build a convincing fake post, chat or notification for a joke or a mockup. Watermarked so nobody mistakes it for the real thing.

A search engine that crawls the web with its own bot rather than renting results from the giants, and does not track who is searching.