Instant

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.

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

Answers the question in one word, correctly, in ninety languages, and has done every single day since 2009.

Answers the question with a single word, and has been right every single time anybody has checked.

Drags the guts of a JPEG around with three sliders, producing the smeared colour blocks that only broken files make.

Tells you which streaming service in your country actually has the film, and whether it is included or a rental.

Seattle public radio with the famous in-studio live sessions, a human DJ on air at all hours and a playlist page that credits everything.

A typing test built from book passages, with detailed statistics on which keys are quietly costing you whole seconds.

Teaches touch typing by generating fake words from the letters you keep fumbling, rather than making you copy out prose.

Every key on the keyboard fires a different sound and a matching burst of animation. No two letters look or sound alike.

A tidy portal of casual browser games with an unusual amount of care given to which ones are actually finished.

Start with one enormous dot; every pass of the cursor splits it into four, until the pixels resolve into a picture.

A voxel arena shooter that holds a high frame rate in a browser tab, with custom lobbies, a map editor and no install.

The Lenny face and its several hundred descendants, catalogued and one click away from your clipboard.

Turns a question into a link that mimes typing it into a search box, for colleagues who never quite learn.

Free chess with no adverts, no account required and an analysis engine better than the paid ones, funded entirely by donations.

Enter your birthday and watch a live tally of the heartbeats, blinks and steps you have got through so far.

Every lightning strike detected worldwide appears within seconds of the flash, triangulated by a volunteer network of home-built receivers.

Car leasing sold via the loudest website ever built — animated GIFs, a theme-park aesthetic, and a real business underneath it.

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

Every Wikipedia edit as it happens, rendered as bells and strings, with each new user announced by a whisper.

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

A clean one-minute test built by a support software company that had a very direct professional interest in typing speed.

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.

Deliberately tiny paint tool inside a fake old window, with fat pixels and a palette that makes clumsy art look intentional.

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

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

Drops you on a random road somewhere on Earth in Street View and leaves you to work out where you are, or simply wander off down 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.

A meticulous recreation of the falling green glyphs, with settings for every version of the effect across the films.

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

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

Every train on the Tokyo rail network moving in real time across a 3D map, with the aircraft landing at Haneda thrown in.

The typing test that made typing tests beautiful — endlessly configurable, instantly readable and quietly addictive.

Live cameras on the kelp forest, the aviary and the open sea tank, plus a sea otter feed that has ended many working afternoons.

One piano keyboard shared by everybody currently online, producing either a Chopin nocturne or an immediate car crash.

Noughties television as it actually was, which is more unsettling than the eighties version because you remember most of it.

A simulated television set showing nothing but 1980s programming and adverts, complete with channel dial and static between stations.

The same idea moved a decade forward. Flip channels through the nineties and land somewhere between a cartoon and a cereal advert.

The largest soundboard on the web with a search box, which makes it either a toy or a workplace hazard.

Active fire and thermal anomaly detections from NASA satellites, updated within hours of each pass and quietly sobering at continental zoom.

The official live stream, which for long stretches is simply Earth turning below the space station.

The link at the end of every bait-and-switch since 2007, and the reason nobody fully trusts a shortened URL.

A vaporwave station running continuously since 2015, wrapped in a desktop you can rearrange while it plays.

A ninja, flexing, to a backing track, at a frame rate suggesting nobody involved was trying especially hard.