💡 Clever

A research-grade open flight tracking network run by universities, with live maps and the raw historical data behind them.

Stanford's model of travel in the Roman world — pick two cities and get the cost, season and days by road or sea.

Write creative code in one pane and watch it run in the next, with no install, no build step and no configuration.

Colourises black-and-white photographs, then lets you steer the result by describing the colours you wanted in words.

MIT's ranking of historically famous people by how many language editions of Wikipedia bother to carry them.

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

Drag mildly biased shapes around a grid and watch a segregated neighbourhood assemble itself without anyone intending it.

Home of Submachine and Daymare Town, Mateusz Skutnik's sketched, wordless worlds built entirely out of corridors and quiet dread.

Random generators for anything, built from plain text lists you can fork and edit yourself. Thousands of community ones already exist.

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

Draw a circle with one unbroken stroke and get scored on how round it actually was. Nobody beats 97% on a trackpad.

Proper trait questionnaires with the scoring shown, rather than a quiz that decides you are a golden retriever.

Colorado's library of physics, chemistry and maths simulations, used in classrooms everywhere and free to meddle with.

Interactive tests designed to find the contradictions in your own stated beliefs, the classic being Battleground God.

Photoshop in a browser tab, layers and all, and it opens Sketch and XD files too. One developer, no sign-up, ads pay for the whole thing.

Sprite and animation editor with onion skinning and a live loop preview, exporting straight to a spritesheet or GIF.

Draw on the grid and it writes the box-shadow monstrosity that renders your sprite with no image file involved at all.

Feed it a photograph and it hands back a pixel-art version, with block size and palette entirely under your control.

Type in the thing you are stressed about, watch it shrink into a distant star over sixty seconds, then close the tab.

Open-source pixel editor with tilemaps, animation and 3D layers, playable in the browser or free to download properly.

Two editors in one — a quick one and a layered one — both free in the browser with the usual filters and masks.

Type a phrase and watch every film clip in which somebody says it, cut back to back until the words stop meaning anything.

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

Solitaire where you choose the shape of the tableau and the rules first, then discover whether it was ever solvable.

Age pyramids for any country from 1950 to 2100, which settles most demographic arguments in a single shape.

A twenty-year-old particle sandbox where wind, fire, magma and ice all interact, with thousands of saved player scenes.

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

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

The colour-word interference test as the real psychology experiment rather than a quiz-site imitation, with your data at the end.

Free monthly puzzle sets designed to be solved in a pub, with a decade of archives you can print at home.

A question site where people post original puzzles and strangers solve them properly, with the reasoning shown.

A quantum computing textbook with spaced repetition built into the page, so what you read has a chance of staying.

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.

Crowd-sourced feed of well-made and gloriously pointless websites, and the closest thing left to a modern stumble button.

Home of the shared pixel canvas where millions of people fought surprisingly politely over a few million squares.

Archive of the experiment where one button and one click each spawned genuine factions, martyrs and a working theology within days.

A community-maintained open database of internet radio streams with no company behind it, which is why the odd little stations survive there.

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.

Pick a country and a decade on a world map and hear what people there were actually listening to, curated by humans since 1900.

Blows one image up into a multi-page halftone poster that you print at home and tape across an entire wall.

A snarkier reference work covering pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and the people making a living from them.

Paste a spreadsheet, pick from chart types most tools refuse to offer, and export an editable vector file.

Amit Patel's tutorials on pathfinding, hexagonal grids and noise, with every parameter exposed as a slider you can ruin.

A Wikipedia article with every meaningful word blacked out; guess words to reveal them until you can name the subject.

Women's magazine parody with headlines observed so precisely that they read as criticism rather than jokes.

Wathan and Schoger's rules for making things look designed when you are not, in fact, a designer.

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

Roguelike tower defence where you lay the map down as you go, and every tile placed narrows the next decision.