Coffee break

The original semantic-distance guessing game, noticeably harder than its descendants and considerably more humbling.

Raw Sentinel and Landsat imagery for anywhere on the planet, free, with band combinations that reveal crops, floods and old burn scars.

Short visual explanations of statistics ideas — eigenvectors, conditional probability, Markov chains — all draggable.

Drag the control points of a letter back into shape. Your score is how far off the real typeface you landed.

Random design briefs with a countdown attached, for when the problem is not skill but having nothing to work on.

A full year of merchant shipping movements animated on one dark globe and split by cargo type, which turns global trade into a visible swarm.

Search engine for internet-connected devices rather than pages: webcams, routers and industrial kit nobody meant to publish.

Editorially curated short films, each with a proper write-up explaining why it was chosen, which is why the hit rate stays high.

Doom compiled to WebAssembly and running at full speed in a tab, which is either nostalgia or a small engineering miracle.

Symmetrical generative art that blooms under the cursor, which everybody who touches it turns into a wallpaper factory.

An infinite canvas for rough diagrams and flows. Opens instantly with nothing to configure and no file to save first.

A better-drawn take on the guess-the-doodle format, with more brushes, custom word lists and rooms that hold a large group.

Full paint program in a tab — brushes, layers, filters and a stamp library — with nothing to install and nothing to pay.

Draw the word, guess everyone else's, share one link with the group. The default browser party game, and deservedly so.

The world's largest supplier of real and replica skulls, browsable by species, which is educational and mildly alarming in equal parts.

The seat-pocket catalogue survived the airline it came with and moved online, still selling garden yetis to a captive audience.

An endless procedurally generated drive through mountains and deserts, with no traffic, no timer and nothing to hit.

Millions of images and 3D scans from the Smithsonian's collections, released with no copyright restrictions at all.

Giant pandas eating bamboo, live from Washington, on the webcam that periodically takes down the zoo's own servers.

Deb Perelman cooking from a famously tiny New York kitchen since 2006, testing everything obsessively and writing about it well.

Fast three-a-side football with sliding tackles and a World Cup bracket you can win inside a tea break.

Push crates into place in rooms built to punish the obvious first move, with thousands of community-made levels behind them.

Clean solitaire collection with hints, statistics and daily challenges spread across a dozen different variants.

Daily solitaire challenges dealt from guaranteed-winnable shuffles, with a leaderboard for people who want the streak.

Rule a small kingdom by answering yes or no to whoever walks through the door, then watch the consequences quietly pile up.

Extrudes type into three dimensions, wraps it round shapes and lets it drift, exporting the result as a loop.

Solar flares, sunspot counts and geomagnetic storm levels in real time, plus the aurora forecast that decides whether tonight is worth the drive.

Seven letters, one compulsory centre letter, and the long climb from Solid to Genius. Ruins mornings extremely productively.

A hundred billion dollars and a shopping list running from Big Macs to aircraft carriers, and it is harder to spend than you expect.

Paste any text and it flashes one word at a time at a speed you pick, which is either speed reading or a mild trance.

Tilemap editor for small games — paint a level from a tileset, then export it straight into Godot or Unity.

Everyone knows the location except the spy, who has to bluff through the questioning without ever revealing they have no idea.

A daily letter grid with dozens of words buried in it, plus a bonus list that runs on far longer than anyone expects.

Grades any public HTTPS server from A+ down to F and explains every single deduction. The reference test the whole industry quotes.

Public domain classics reset properly — typography fixed, typos corrected, covers designed — and then given away.

Curated collections around specific research subjects, preserved because a university decided they would matter later.

Survival game about not freezing to death, in which the other players are the weather's most enthusiastic accomplices.

An idle game that keeps buying you more stimulation until the page is a lo-fi stream, a podcast and a fidget spinner at once.

Categories under a random letter and a timer: name a country, a food and an animal starting with M, then hit stop before anyone else.

Round-the-clock video study rooms full of strangers revising in silence, with pomodoro timers ticking in the corner.

Gag gift shop selling the same reliable nonsense since the dot-com boom, on a layout that has aged in real time.

The actual cables carrying the internet between continents, each one named, with its landing points and the year it went live.

Clean daily sudoku across five difficulties, with a notes mode that behaves the way a pencil is supposed to.

Good news, funny pictures and a daily dose of animals, assembled with no interest whatsoever in what is trending.

The seven-day jam build where time only moves when you do, still free in the browser and still one of the decade's best ideas.

The community revival of surviv.io, the sharp little 2D battle royale that was shut down and flatly refused to stay dead.

Board games rendered as physical objects on a 3D table with no rules enforcement, so you can still play badly like at home.

Base building with tameable pets, farming and raids, which is a lot of systems for something that loads instantly.