Coffee break

Tagged great whites ping their position whenever a fin breaks the surface, each shark named, weighed and given its own profile page.

Feed of products that should not exist, from bacon-scented soap to a hammock designed to hang under your desk.

Eldritch horror podcast set in an alternate Appalachia where the mountains are older than people and considerably less friendly.

Search hundreds of thousands of scanned historical maps by place and date, held by libraries worldwide.

Eighty thousand New York photographs from the 1870s onwards, mapped to the corners they were shot on.

Browses the archives through emulated period browsers, so an old page renders the way it did rather than the way Chrome guesses.

Screenshots of archived GeoCities pages posted automatically, one after another, as a rolling portrait of the amateur web.

The English-speaking world's Go server, where correspondence games run for weeks and somebody always explains why your move was bad.

Multi-instrument piano roll in a browser, backed by thousands of user sequences you can open, pull apart and ruin.

Hand-curated index of several thousand active blogs, sorted by subject, for when you want writing rather than a feed.

A daily index of the free courses, audiobooks, films and ebooks scattered across the rest of the internet.

A catalogue page for every book ever published, a good many of them borrowable straight in the browser.

Free, ad-free versions of the actual academic instruments, with the collected raw data published for anyone who wants to poke at it.

Spin a globe, drop on a city, hear whatever its local radio is playing right now. Works best somewhere you have never been.

Open-source successor to Territorial.io: push borders across a world map, form alliances and break them at precisely the right moment.

A free street-view guessing game with unlimited rounds, built for people unwilling to pay a monthly subscription to look at roads.

Open-source emoji set drawn by design students, free to use, and in several places noticeably better than the defaults.

Every railway line on Earth mapped with signalling, gauge, electrification and maximum speed, by people who care about this very deeply.

A research-grade open flight tracking network run by universities, with live maps and the raw historical data behind them.

Stanford's model of travel in the Roman world — pick two cities and get the cost, season and days by road or sea.

The souped-up fork of the infinite text canvas, with colour, links and long-running territory disputes conducted entirely in ASCII.

Write creative code in one pane and watch it run in the next, with no install, no build step and no configuration.

Recorded user flows from real products, so you can watch an onboarding happen rather than guess at how it went.

The New York Post's gossip column, now its own site, still running on restaurant tip-offs and unnamed sources.

The old-school colour scheme designer: one wheel, a live preview page, and far more control than the modern tools.

MIT's ranking of historically famous people by how many language editions of Wikipedia bother to carry them.

Build sundaes to order under mounting time pressure, the most polished entry in a series about the dignity of service work.

The original of the Papa's series, where tips fund your upgrades and customers absolutely notice an undercooked base.

Drag mildly biased shapes around a grid and watch a segregated neighbourhood assemble itself without anyone intending it.

Historically accurate emulations of early PCs, down to the timing, with the original manuals and ROM listings alongside.

Random generators for anything, built from plain text lists you can fork and edit yourself. Thousands of community ones already exist.

Proper trait questionnaires with the scoring shown, rather than a quiz that decides you are a golden retriever.

Plays YouTube videos with almost no views, which turn out to be mostly a stranger's kitchen and a camera left running.

Colorado's library of physics, chemistry and maths simulations, used in classrooms everywhere and free to meddle with.

Interactive tests designed to find the contradictions in your own stated beliefs, the classic being Battleground God.

Photoshop in a browser tab, layers and all, and it opens Sketch and XD files too. One developer, no sign-up, ads pay for the whole thing.

Sprite and animation editor with onion skinning and a live loop preview, exporting straight to a spritesheet or GIF.

Weather model charts for anywhere in the world, fast and free, of the sort forecasters look at rather than the tidied-up app version.

Draw on the grid and it writes the box-shadow monstrosity that renders your sprite with no image file involved at all.

Open-source pixel editor with tilemaps, animation and 3D layers, playable in the browser or free to download properly.

Sprite editor with layers and animation frames, wrapped in an unusually friendly community gallery of other people's work.

Two editors in one — a quick one and a layered one — both free in the browser with the usual filters and masks.

A virtual table with real decks you drag around by hand, for playing whatever house rules your group refuses to drop.

Daily roundups of the funniest things posted elsewhere, a genre this one has been working since 2009.

Every Poe story and poem with annotations, a timeline and a vocabulary tool, kept by one enthusiast since the early web.

Hand-listed index of useless websites, sorted into categories so you can choose your waste of time rather than roll for it.

Spin up a private poker table and send the link round: no accounts, no downloads and no actual money involved.

Solitaire where you choose the shape of the tableau and the rules first, then discover whether it was ever solvable.