💡 Clever

Records a page as you browse it, capturing the parts a crawler cannot — logged-in views, video, anything behind a click.

Sixteen words, four hidden groups, four mistakes allowed. The traps are the entire point and they are very carefully set.

Guess the secret word and be told only how semantically close you got. Rank 4,000 feels like progress, and it very much is not.

Recipes laid out as a table of operations instead of prose, so you can see at a glance what combines with what and when.

Hit the space bar for a five-colour palette, lock the ones you like, hit it again. The whole tool is that loop.

A few hundred browser escape rooms in one filtered shelf, all running in the tab with nothing to install and nothing to buy.

Scores films for you by finding users whose past ratings track yours, then weighting their opinions. Recommendation with the maths shown.

Translates a cron expression into plain English as you type it, then tells you when it will next fire. Ends a very specific argument.

Wordle in reverse: you are handed the green and yellow clues and have to reconstruct the guesses that could have produced them.

An explorable on how ideas and riots spread through a social network, with the contagion thresholds under your control.

Chain encoders and classical ciphers together and watch text transform between formats at each step.

Builds a gradient visually and hands over the CSS, including the awkward multi-stop and radial cases.

Recreate a target image in as few characters of CSS as possible, then watch somebody do it in half as many.

Tower defence from the villain's side, defending your gems from heroes using demons, orcs and the undead.

GCHQ's cyber swiss army knife: chain base64, XOR, hashes and regex into a recipe and watch the data transform at every step.

A hundred consecutive interface prompts delivered by email — the sign-up flow, the 404 page, the calculator, day by day.

Fly a helicopter, wall off territory with towers, then defend the shape you just drew from everybody else.

German satirical news delivered with a completely straight face, plus a weekly video bulletin, running since 2008.

The 2007 original that turned maze building into a genre, played across a desktop with the icons still sitting on it.

Alarming research site about a chemical found in tumours, acid rain and every reservoir on earth. The chemical is water.

An avatar library where you can dial through a dozen illustration styles and copy the result straight out as an image.

The same six panels of clip-art dinosaurs every day since 2003, with entirely different words in them each time.

Turns any image into one-bit dithered grain, with a choice of classic algorithms and a two-colour palette picker.

Dithering aimed squarely at the chunky, ugly end of the spectrum, with palettes lifted from old hardware.

Serious dithering workbench with dozens of algorithms, custom palettes, live preview and a video mode as well.

An interface that forbids clicking entirely and makes you navigate by hovering, which is far stranger than it sounds.

Dashcam footage of a city loop with the local radio playing over it, so you can drive slowly through Istanbul while answering email.

JavaScript demos in 140 characters. The gap between how little code there is and what appears is the whole appeal.

Interactive classroom illusions you can drag, toggle and pause, which makes the effects considerably harder to dismiss.

A museum of Google easter eggs that Google removed — gravity, the barrel roll, the mirrored search — all restored and working.

Every Google emoji mashup, searchable — pick two and get the official illustrated hybrid back as a PNG.

Upload a photograph and it rebuilds the entire thing out of emoji, colour-matched one tile at a time.

Search, click, paste, with nothing else on the page competing for attention, which is precisely the point.

All 2^122 version-four UUIDs listed in order with a working search box, on a page that should not be able to exist.

Design a creature from joints and muscles, then watch a genetic algorithm spend hundreds of generations teaching it to limp.

The hub for playable posts — effectively the index for the entire genre of learn-by-fiddling essays.

An idle game built on actual differential equations, with optional theory levels that teach you the mathematics as you climb.

Home of the GROW games, where you choose an order for a handful of objects and then watch a tiny world assemble or fail.

Ugly, ancient, and still better than everything else at cutting, resizing, reversing and optimising a GIF.

Short, sourced facts arranged so one leads into the next. Built for the specific pleasure of learning something you can repeat.

Full-screen fake update screens for every operating system, including the blue one, with a bar that never finishes.

Build a circuit and watch current move through it as coloured dots, with an oscilloscope available on any node.

Build a machine from wheels and rods to push a ball into a zone, and accept that it will topple over the first nine times.

Two dozen SVG generators in one place — noise, grain, blobs, dots, gradients, mesh — all exportable and all free.

A toy about synchronisation — a few hundred blinking dots that agree on a rhythm with no conductor anywhere.

A flag revealed six squares at a time, which sounds straightforward until you meet the fourth consecutive tricolour.

Every direct flight from any airport in the world drawn on one map, which is the fastest way to plan an unreasonable journey.

Nathan Yau's long-running blog on charts done well and badly, plus his own studies of how a day gets spent.