💡 Clever

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.

Suggests font pairings from a model trained on type, with locks so you can hold one face and reroll the other.

Plays tracks that nobody has ever streamed, not once. The play counter is the whole point, and the music is exactly as advertised.

Six stills from one film, revealed one at a time. Getting it from the first frame is the only score really worth having.

Draw a track, then ride your own drawing on a BMX. Millions of user-made levels, most of them designed to be cruel.

Opens as a dismal educational maths game about a frog eating flies, and then keeps going somewhere else entirely. Say nothing more.

A search engine that strips every result down to plain HTML so it can be read on a genuinely ancient computer. Also very fast.

A daily gleaning of curiosities, lateral puzzles and pleasing coincidences, kept up since 2005 without fuss.

Seven levels of talking a language model into revealing a password it was told to protect. The best hands-on lesson in prompt injection going.

Walks you through rebuilding classic algorithmic pieces — tiled lines, Joy Division, cubic disarray — one step at a time.

A genetic algorithm evolves two-dimensional cars across rough terrain while you watch generations fail forward.

Plain page of every emoji, grouped and clickable, for the machines that have no emoji keyboard worth using.

Industrial fishing vessel tracks worldwide, rebuilt from satellite signals, showing exactly where the world's fleets have been working.

Name three bands you like, then answer yes or no to its guesses until it works out what you are actually in the mood for.

Red-carpet criticism written with real fashion knowledge and jokes aimed at the outfit rather than the person in it.

Chart how often a phrase appears in books since 1500, which settles a surprising number of arguments outright.

Tim Rowett's collection of optical toys and physics oddities, each demonstrated on camera by a man visibly delighted with all of it.

Choose ten items in the right order and the cube blossoms into something absurd; choose the wrong order and it sulks at you.

Comic-strip teardowns of real product decisions, each one explaining the psychology behind why it did or did not work.

Look at a scatter plot and guess its correlation coefficient. A statistics lecture disguised as a slot machine, and it works.

Daily coverage of hardware projects that had no commercial reason to exist. Reliably the most inventive corner of the web.

Mash any keys and perfectly formatted code appears character by character, exactly as in every hacking scene ever filmed.

Generates blobs, waves, stacked layers and low-poly grids as SVG, all of them tweakable and all free to export.

Vector halftone generator that rebuilds an image out of dots, lines or waves and exports it as clean SVG.

Mr Doob's sketching toy, where strokes web themselves together with connecting threads and turn scribbles into shading.

A superhero character creator with a costume parts library deep enough to have outlasted three separate web technologies.

Shoot the alien whose colour matches the hex code shown. Learning to read hex by sight is an accidental side effect.

Allie Brosh's illustrated essays, including the two on depression that remain the best thing written about it.

Overlays one country on another to scale, then works out how your life expectancy, income and odds of various things would change there.

A map of the solar system drawn to true scale, meaning most of your scrolling is spent crossing absolutely nothing.

Mocks up a screenshot of a conversation that never happened, for jokes and design mock-ups rather than anything serious.

A philosophy department's catalogue of illusions, each with what it is, what it demonstrates, and the argument still going about it.

Warps a photograph through a draggable mesh, so faces melt by exactly as much as you decide they should.

Rebuilds a photograph out of coloured triangles, with sliders controlling exactly how abstract you want to get.

Catalogue of impossible figures, ambiguous objects and Escher-adjacent architecture, kept up by one very devoted collector.

Dress beatboxers in different outfits and each one adds a loop, building a full a cappella track by drag and drop.

Combine two things to make a third, forever, until you have coaxed a language model into inventing something absurd.

Classic Mac OS booting instantly in a browser, with the software of the period already installed and ready to open.

The annual competition that decides what interactive fiction is this year, with every entry free to play in the browser.

A giant shelf of old programs and games that boot right in the browser through emulation, from early home computers to forgotten utilities.

Faithful browser rebuild of the Roland TR-808, down to the orange buttons and the cowbell nobody can leave alone.

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