🔧 Useful

Disposable inbox that self-destructs after ten minutes. Exactly what you want when a download demands an email address first.

The blunt one-minute word test that has served as the internet's default words-per-minute benchmark for over a decade.

Collection of period-correct cursor trails — rainbows, bubbles, snowflakes, ghosts — demoed live so you can wave the mouse about.

Hand-picked, highly rated films that were never blockbusters, filterable by mood and by where you can currently stream them.

Thousands of free electronics tutorials with full wiring diagrams and working code. The gentlest on-ramp to microcontrollers there is.

The proper colour wheel — analogous, triadic, split complementary — plus contrast checks for accessibility.

Live flight tracking with airport arrival boards and playback of earlier flights, formerly known as RadarBox and still free to browse.

Vast crowd-sourced recipe database where the comments are the actual feature — thousands of people telling you what to change.

Free woodworking plans with cut lists and costed materials, aimed squarely at people who own exactly one saw.

AniList's seasonal grid: everything airing this season in one scroll, sortable by popularity, score or start date.

Obsessively detailed database going down to individual episode credits and file hashes. Built for cataloguers, not for browsing.

Modern tracker with a genuinely good interface, per-episode progress and an open API a great many other tools build on.

Every knot worth knowing, animated frame by frame so you can scrub back and forth until your hands finally get it.

Industry news since 1998, plus an encyclopedia with staff and voice credits that nothing else in the space matches.

Recommendation-led catalogue with if-you-liked-this chains going back to 2001, plus legal streaming links for each title.

Multilingual anime, manga and light novel database with unusually careful tagging and full regional release information.

The spaced repetition flashcard system serious learners settle on, with shared decks for nearly every subject.

Thousands of themed collections built by libraries and museums, each one somebody's deliberate decision about what to keep.

Takes a permanent snapshot of a page on demand, including ones the Wayback Machine will not capture. Useful when a page is about to change.

The Portuguese web archive, notable for full-text search across its whole history rather than only address lookup.

The preprint server where most physics, maths and computer science appears long before a journal touches it.

Draws boxes, arrows and flowcharts entirely out of monospace characters, for diagrams that live inside code comments.

Generates a genuinely handsome natal chart and flags the rarer patterns, with celebrity charts on hand to compare against.

Free birth charts, synastry and transit calculators with more configuration options than most paid software. No account required.

The Swiss Ephemeris people: the technical reference the whole field quietly runs on, plus free charts and very long interpretation texts.

Long-running Vedic astrology portal with free kundli generation, matchmaking and a daily panchang in several languages.

The AstroTwins' horoscopes and explainers, including a decent plain-English guide to what a transit actually is.

Draw a wonky shape and it offers professional illustrations of what it thinks you meant. Ruthlessly effective on anyone who cannot draw.

A cheerful cartoon avatar generator in one fixed illustration style, endlessly recombined and free to use anywhere.

A straightforward cartoon portrait builder with vector output, useful for when a real profile photo is genuinely not an option.

Lorem ipsum made entirely of cured meats, for mock-ups where nobody was going to read the filler text anyway.

Filter by genre, format and city to find records sold directly by the people who made them, with full streams before you buy anything.

Thousands of recipes in metric with honest timings and star ratings left by people who genuinely cooked the thing.

Chiptune tracker with a whole song's worth of channels, shareable as a URL that contains the entire tune inside it.

Photo editor and collage maker aimed squarely at people who want a decent result without learning anything first.

Maths explained by intuition first and formulas second, by someone who clearly resented how he was taught it.

The personality model psychologists actually use, in a clean 120-question version with a proper breakdown of every facet.

A countdown big enough to read from the back of the room, which is the only real requirement a workshop timer has.

A blog that has been finding the best browser escape and point-and-click games every week since 2005, and is still posting.

Code-breaking tools and a cipher identifier for when you have a string of nonsense and no idea what it is.

Every recipe costed per serving and per batch, with step photos throughout. Built for people cooking against an actual number.

Enormous plain-text library explaining what every placement and aspect is supposed to mean, unpaywalled since the early 2000s.

Thirty-odd card games with competent bots, no accounts and nothing covering the table. The default answer to fancying a game.

Estimated fortunes for anybody famous, sourced loosely, and impossible to stop clicking once you look up the first one.

Per-component checklists — buttons, forms, cards, empty states — covering the things everyone forgets until review.

A stocked chemistry bench in the browser where you can mix reagents and get it badly wrong at no cost.

Google's stripped-back sketchpad — pencil, pen, marker, chalk — with pressure support and absolutely no other features.

Scanned American newspapers from 1770 to 1963, full-text searchable, which is a dangerous thing to discover on a weeknight.