🔧 Useful

How far you can get by train from any European station in five hours, drawn as coloured bands. Ruinous for an afternoon's productivity.

Paint over whatever is ruining a photo and it fills the gap convincingly. Free at standard resolution with no account.

Fill-in-the-blank sentences mined from real corpora, aimed squarely at people who have outgrown the beginner apps.

The murmur of a café without the queue or the cost, built on research that moderate background noise helps creative work.

A plain, ad-free bank of cognitive tests — n-back, digit span, Stroop, mental rotation — that keeps a history of your scores.

Hand-picked four-colour palettes posted daily and sorted by mood, with none of a generator's randomness.

Palette generator trained on photographs and films, so the colours it suggests look like they came from somewhere real.

Petabytes of crawled web pages released free for anyone to analyse. Most of the language models you have used started here.

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

Generates hero images — gradients, particles, triangles, topography — at whatever resolution you need, free to download.

Chrome, flames and bevelled gradients — the 2003 logo generator, still online and still producing exactly that.

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

The biggest browser arcade going, with genuinely decent HTML5 ports and a search that mostly finds the game you meant.

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

The entire tower defence shelf in one place, sorted by how many people are currently playing, none of it requiring an account.

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

Where every cruise ship in the world currently is, with deck plans and itineraries attached, for reasons entirely your own.

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.

Sugar-coated filler text for wireframes, with sliders for exactly how sweet and how long the nonsense should be.

The volunteer-edited web directory that outlived DMOZ, still organising the internet into a category tree by hand.

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

A weekly newsletter of unusual public datasets, with an archive of thousands you had no idea were collected.

The charting tool most newsrooms quietly rely on, free at the sizes any one person will ever need.

Several hundred cipher, code and puzzle solvers in one place, from Caesar shifts to crossword pattern matching.

Harry Brignull's catalogue of interfaces built to trick people, complete with a hall of shame and the resulting case law.

Mix rain, keyboards, seagulls and a fireplace into one soundscape, then hand the whole mix to somebody as a single link.

A graphing calculator good enough that people make art with it — type a function and drag its parameters about.

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

Paste two blocks of text and get a colour-coded diff back immediately. Also handles PDFs, images and spreadsheets.

One search across thousands of American libraries, archives and museums, with curated exhibitions layered on top.

The catalogue of every physical release ever pressed, down to matrix numbers and pressing variants, plus what your copy is worth.

Runs a standard or extended check to reveal which servers actually saw your DNS lookups. The quickest way to catch a VPN not doing its job.

Crowdsourced content warnings covering a hundred-odd specific triggers, so you can check beforehand rather than find out during.

Full flowchart, floorplan and network-diagram editor that saves to your own drive and has never once asked anyone for money.

Precise Hindu calendar giving tithi, nakshatra and auspicious timings for any date and location. Astronomically rigorous throughout.

Search without the profile building, plus bang shortcuts that fire your query straight at another site. Type an exclamation and w for Wikipedia.

Gamified courses in dozens of languages, plus the guilt engine keeping most people's streaks technically alive.

The carbon intensity of the grid across most of the world, coloured by how clean each country's electricity happens to be at this minute.

Enormous archive of emoji strings, kaomoji and text arrangements, searchable by whatever you are trying to say.

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

Every emoji with its meaning, its history and how it renders on each platform. Settles arguments in one link.

The professional encyclopedia, still going, and a useful second opinion whenever Wikipedia gets contested.

A daily firehose of new escape games from Japanese and indie developers, with walkthroughs in the comments for when you stall.

Fifty million digitised items from European museums, libraries and archives, behind one search box.

Obsessive gallery of what strangers keep in their pockets, photographed from above and argued over at remarkable length.

Hand-drawn-looking diagrams that somehow stay legible, with live collaboration and no account. The whiteboard for people who hate whiteboards.

Search any Android app and see the tracking libraries baked into it. The results for the popular ones are routinely grim.