🧠 Brainy

Virtual trading contests running on live market data, playable against colleagues without anybody risking actual money.

Industrial supply catalogue with half a million parts, organised so well that engineers browse it purely for pleasure.

Every part of a wristwatch exploded and animated in sequence, until the escapement finally makes sense.

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

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

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.

The one free IQ test people actually cite: thirty-five matrix puzzles, twenty-five minutes, no email address demanded at the end.

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.

Around 140 visual phenomena, each with sliders to break the effect and a vision scientist's explanation of why you fell for it.

Factory building crossed with tower defence: conveyor belts feed the guns, and the guns hold the line while you fix the belts.

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

Decades of archived puzzle hunts from the hardest annual competition of its kind, all of it still playable.

Screenshot library of real mobile and web apps, organised by flow, so you can see how everybody else solved it first.

Search any molecule and spin its three-dimensional structure, with spectra and crystal data alongside it.

MIT's trolley problem for driverless cars: decide who the car kills, thirteen times over, then read your own bias summarised back.

The Internet Archive's full film and video collection — public domain features, home movies, government reels and stranger things.

A daily logic murder mystery with suspects, weapons and locations, solved by grid deduction in about ten minutes.

Los Angeles museum whose exhibits may or may not be true, with a website built in exactly the same ambiguous spirit.

Every format anybody ever stored anything on, documented with photographs and the dates it lived between. Far more than you expect.

An exhaustive archive of worlds built in a 1991 ASCII game creator, catalogued with more care than most national collections.

The open music encyclopedia much of the industry quietly relies on, editable by anybody and free of any label's marketing department.

Long beatless mixes chosen for the state of mind where code actually goes in, delivered as plain numbered episodes.

Hundreds of calibrated soundscapes with ten-slider equalisers, built by an audio engineer who takes tinnitus relief seriously.

A twenty-level escape game from 2001 that defined the whole genre several years before the genre had a name for itself.

Live tracking for thousands of satellites, with pass predictions for your postcode and a map of everything above you right now.

Type a surname and get where it came from, what it originally meant and where in the world it still clusters.

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

The full NASA satellite archive as daily global mosaics, with a date slider you can drag back two decades to watch ice, dust and smoke move.

The searchable index of American federal records, running from founding documents to recently declassified memos.

Canada put its entire animation and documentary archive online for free, and some of it is the strangest work any government ever funded.

Run a country by answering one absurd policy dilemma a day, then watch your statistics drift somewhere you did not intend.

The live feed from a deep-sea research ship's remote submersible, complete with scientists audibly losing composure over a new sea cucumber.

Neal Agarwal's collection of interactive toys and explainers, every one of them built far better than it needed to be.

A blog of neat things — odd history, strange products, good comics — running since 2005 with no algorithm involved.

Wordle for equations: eight tiles holding one arithmetic statement that has to balance as well as being correct.

Rhizome's restored survey of a hundred works of net art, each with the context needed to understand why it mattered.

Thirty years of usability research written up plainly and still free to read, which is why everyone cites it.

The studio behind Bloons, with a browser games shelf that still hosts the tower defence titles the genre was built on.

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.

Everybody notable enough for a Wikipedia entry, plotted at their birthplace, so you can find out who else came from your town.

The riddle that calls itself the hardest on the internet, played by editing URLs and reading page source.

One well-sourced strange story per weekday, told at exactly the length of a cup of coffee.

London online radio with thousands of shows in the archive, most presented by somebody with an unreasonable record collection.

Notebooks for building charts in the browser, with a public gallery of thousands you can fork and pull apart.