💡 Clever

One golf hole a day, built to look trivial and then take nine attempts, with a score everybody can compare.

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

Jason Kottke has been posting the interesting bits of the web since 1998, with no algorithm involved at any point.

Gossip written as media criticism, tracking how celebrity stories get placed and who stands to benefit from the placing.

Free audio courses that teach by making you work out the grammar yourself, made by one person with no adverts.

Ableton's free course on beats, basslines and song structure, taught by handing you the instruments inside the page.

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.

Travel outwards at light speed while hearing which radio hits have reached each distance, oldest at the far edge.

Draw a track and watch a sledder ride it, a physics toy people have spent years turning into hand-drawn music videos.

Hundreds of small text translators — pirate, medieval, wingdings, uwu — plus a builder for making your own.

Wikipedia's running audit of the things almost everyone believes and almost nobody has ever checked.

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

Start with four elements and work towards seven hundred, most of which are jokes you only understand on arrival.

Fakes a phone's live activity banner — a food delivery, a match score, a boarding pass — for screenshots and mockups.

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

Analogue horror shaped like a small-town TV station's broadcast archive, including the night it advised everyone to look up.

Draw circles and arrows, press play, and your scribble runs as a working feedback-loop simulation.

Browser sprite editor built around palette discipline, with the specific constraints pixel artists keep asking for.

A convincing macOS desktop rebuilt in Svelte, dock animations included, running entirely inside the browser.

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

The maker movement's own magazine: projects, tool reviews and the long-running argument about what counts as making something.

Generate a fake newspaper clipping, a talking animation or a ransom note. The 2005 internet, rebuilt so it still works.

Every open source project plotted as a landmass, with related repositories clustering into continents you can pan across.

Colour in countries, states or regions and export the result, which is where most of the maps you see argued about online are made.

Street-level photography stitched together from volunteers' dashcams and phones, covering a great many roads no Google car ever drove down.

Pomodoro, custom and kitchen-timer modes with a shareable link, so a whole team can run the same twenty-five minutes.

Search the web with the top million most popular sites removed. What is left is the internet nobody bothers optimising for.

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

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

Build a convincing fake post, chat or notification for a joke or a mockup. Watermarked so nobody mistakes it for the real thing.

Builds a photo mosaic out of hundreds of your other photos, free to make and zoomable right down to each tile.

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

Type a band and get a cloud of other bands, positioned by how often listeners like both. Crude, ancient and still weirdly effective.

Fictional US national park built inside a colossal living organism, documented entirely as tourist brochures and incident reports.

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.

Georeferenced Ordnance Survey sheets you can fade against satellite imagery to see exactly what got demolished.

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

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

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

Board games rebuilt for a group on a video call, with each person playing from their own phone. Codenames and Wavelength included.

Fast, minimal tracker that pings you the moment a followed episode airs. Open source and deliberately kept lightweight.

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

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

Browses the archives through emulated period browsers, so an old page renders the way it did rather than the way Chrome guesses.

Multi-instrument piano roll in a browser, backed by thousands of user sequences you can open, pull apart and ruin.

Gallery of Processing and p5.js sketches where every piece runs in the page and the source is right there to fork.