🔧 Useful

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

Seventeen million scanned volumes from research libraries, with full-text search running across the entire lot.

Type an email address and find out which breaches it turned up in. Troy Hunt's index now covers billions of leaked accounts.

Tells you exactly when the space station will pass over your garden, and which direction to look.

Placeholder text made of artisanal nonsense, optionally cut with real Latin for clients who prefer not to notice.

Full-text search across every Hacker News story and comment, filterable by date and points. Find the thread where a famous project first appeared.

Tens of thousands of hosted model demos, each running in a browser tab. The closest thing machine learning has to an arcade.

Every known way to lace and tie a shoe, diagrammed by one Australian for over two decades, including a knot he invented himself.

Catalogue, reviews and play links for four decades of interactive fiction, maintained by people who take the form extremely seriously.

Free illustrated repair manuals for phones, laptops, cars and appliances, plus teardowns that name and shame every glued-in battery.

Merge, split, compress, rotate, sign and convert PDFs from a single page. Covers nearly everything Acrobat charges a subscription for.

The canonical crowd-ranked list of 250 films, weighted to resist review bombing. A reliable way to spot the gap in your viewing.

Every meme template with the text boxes already in the right places, and no watermark once you find the setting.

A calendar of every conjunction, eclipse and meteor shower coming up, with charts drawn for your own location.

Every plant and animal anybody has photographed and posted, mapped, with a community that will identify your mystery beetle within hours.

The wiki of a movement for owning your own website: guides, tools and real examples of people publishing on their own domains.

Step-by-step build guides for anything from a bookshelf to a plasma cutter, written by the people who actually made the thing.

Books, films, software, concerts and the web itself, archived at a scale no other institution has come close to.

The Archive's Flash collection, running thousands of dead games inside an emulator so the whole era stays clickable.

Archived research papers, including preprints and journals that have since folded, kept readable rather than merely cited.

A stock market simulator with real prices and imaginary money, which is very much the correct order to learn that in.

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

Point it at any classic story file and it runs in the tab, which makes the whole Infocom era playable without installing an interpreter.

A marketplace of language tutors giving one-to-one video lessons at wildly varying prices and standards.

Kaomoji, dongers and text faces sorted by category, with a copy button attached to every single one of them.

The review site that effectively invented walkthrough culture for escape games, with an archive going back nearly two decades.

Cleaner and more factual than its rivals, strongest on geography and history, and mercifully free of which-character quizzes.

Straightforward celebrity photo blogging updated hourly, with none of the editorialising the rest of the genre insists on.

Japanese home cooking explained for people without a Japanese pantry, with substitutions that do not quietly ruin the dish.

Tells you which streaming service in your country actually has the film, and whether it is included or a rental.

Thousands of Japanese emoticons sorted by emotion, running from mild confusion all the way to full table flipping.

A typing test built from book passages, with detailed statistics on which keys are quietly costing you whole seconds.

Teaches touch typing by generating fake words from the letters you keep fumbling, rather than making you copy out prose.

Baking recipes given by weight, with a hotline-grade troubleshooting blog attached. Where to go when a loaf has gone wrong.

Anime and manga tracker with a friendly interface and a public API, run as an open-source project rather than an ad business.

A tidy portal of casual browser games with an unusual amount of care given to which ones are actually finished.

Painting app with layers, symmetry and a genuinely good brush engine, loading instantly and uploading nothing anywhere.

Thousands of landing pages sorted by industry and style, which makes it the reference for anyone writing one.

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

Two decades of listening data turned into recommendations, similar-artist chains and neighbours with suspiciously identical taste.

Fitts, Hick, Jakob and the rest, each with a plain explanation and a poster you will end up printing out.

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

Turns a question into a link that mimes typing it into a search box, for colleagues who never quite learn.

Log films, rate them, and read reviews by people trying to be funny rather than professional. The social network cinema deserved.

Photographs, manuscripts, sheet music and film from the largest library in the world, mostly free to reuse.

Public domain books read aloud by volunteers, free to download, uneven in quality and endless in supply.

Free chess with no adverts, no account required and an analysis engine better than the paid ones, funded entirely by donations.

Daily tips on doing ordinary things slightly better, running since 2005 and still occasionally genuinely surprising.