Instant

The thirty-minute aurora forecast as an oval of probability drawn over the poles, which is the only honest way to plan a night out for it.

Rain, wind, fan and coffee-shop loops you layer into one background mix, then save as a preset for the rest of the week.

The US National Weather Service radar, unstyled and authoritative, with warning polygons drawn straight over the raw returns.

The pop-tart cat, the rainbow and the song, with a counter for how many seconds of your life you have handed over.

Physically modelled sea you can retune — wind speed, swell, choppiness — rendering waves that behave properly.

A cabinet of small physics experiments — cloth, water, ragdolls, particles — built by one developer who simply kept going.

Where English words came from, sourced and dated, compiled by one man who has been at it since 2000.

Station listings for nearly every country, each with a playlist history so you can identify the track that finished before you looked up.

Scroll to unroll an infinite toilet roll and scroll back to wind it up, presented by the artist with a completely straight face.

Claim territory by driving loops around it while everyone else tries to clip your tail before you make it home.

Noughts and crosses, gomoku and Connect Four against a real stranger, matched in about four seconds with no signup.

Every letter on the keyboard fires a sound and a matching shape, and mashing the whole row is the correct way to use it.

Draw a circle with the mouse and get scored on it to one decimal place. Nobody in recorded history has stopped after one attempt.

A hand-drawn character builder in the Open Peeps style, producing an avatar that does not look machine-generated.

Grid, palette, mouse. The whole tool fits on one page and you are drawing about three seconds after it loads.

Live flight tracking with an augmented-reality view, for pointing a phone at whatever just went over the garden and naming it.

A plain, fast game server that has outlived every redesign trend since 2001 and still hosts chess, draughts and mahjong.

Put your cursor anywhere on the page and it finds a photograph of a person pointing at exactly that spot.

Clean, fast and mobile-first, with a front page that reads more like a curated shelf than a dump of everything uploaded.

Twenty-five minute cycles with a running log of what you spent each one on, in case you need the evidence later.

A pomodoro timer with a task list bolted on, which is roughly the entire feature set anybody actually uses.

A radio station styled as a 1980s Macintosh, playing the sort of music that assumes you are near a pool and not at work.

Click the cat, the cat pops, and every click is added to your country's total in a global leaderboard nobody asked for.

The sequel, with proper solid objects and adjustable gravity, and a public save gallery going back well over a decade.

Full-screen fake terminals, fake updates and fake system alerts. Harmless, closeable with Escape, and very funny on a colleague's screen.

The RPG with the player removed: choose a race, then watch the bars fill for years. Still the sharpest joke about the genre.

A pug in a rug, plus a timer counting exactly how long you have now watched the pug be in the rug.

A cat purr you tune by size, mood and breathing rate, for people who work better with a notional cat on the desk.

Doodle six things in twenty seconds while a neural net shouts guesses at you. The training set it produced now runs to fifty million drawings.

Spin a globe covered in green dots and drop the needle on a live local station anywhere on Earth. The buffering is part of the charm.

Human-curated and listener-supported, mixed like an album rather than a playlist, at an absurdly high bitrate if you want it.

A tidy directory of tens of thousands of broadcast stations by country, genre and topic, with nothing to sign up for before you press play.

Rain radar for most of the world with a past-and-future loop, which answers the question of whether to leave now in about four seconds.

Half an hour of rain and distant thunder on a loop, running since before background noise was a productivity category.

One button, one random inhabited spot on Earth in Street View, most of them somewhere nobody would ever have chosen to look.

Leaves a trail of emoji behind your cursor. There is nothing more to it than that, and nothing more is needed.

Cuts the background out of a photo in about five seconds, stray hairs included. Free at web resolution, no account needed.

Translations shown inside real bilingual sentences, so you can see which option a person would actually use.

Rhymes, near rhymes, synonyms and usage examples — quietly the best tool available to anyone writing anything.

Sandwiches rotating slowly on a loop, under a tagline that reads simply, and accurately, that's it.

The percentage that launched a thousand arguments — the share of critics who were positive, which is not an average score.

Three colour fields flipping between red, green and blue as you move, a fixture of the useless-web canon and a strobe risk.

Tells you the best three minutes to leave for the toilet during any film, and summarises exactly what you missed. Absurd, and it works.

Live cameras on pandas, penguins, apes and elephants, with keepers wandering into shot at feeding time and narrating as they go.

A falling-sand game with several hundred materials that all react properly, including a dozen ways to end the world by mistake.

Reverse image search tuned for illustration: hand it a cropped screenshot and it names the artist and the original post.

A first-person shooter in which every player is an egg and every hit is messy. Considerably better than that premise deserves.

A live feed of OpenStreetMap edits as they happen, zooming to each contributor's patch of the world one small correction at a time.