🔧 Useful

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.

Read and listen to real material while tapping unknown words, which quietly become your review deck.

Seasonal chart of everything currently airing, with countdowns to the next episode and which service is carrying it.

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

Clickable map quizzes for every region on Earth, unfashionable in design and better than everything that has replaced it.

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

The canonical placeholder text, plus the Cicero passage it was cut from and an explanation of what it says.

Thousands of curated palettes, from Game Boy green to 64-colour monsters, each downloadable in every format going.

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

The best-known brain-training subscription, with a free daily set of games and rather a lot of graphs about your own decline.

Korean home cooking taught with video for everything, including how to make the kimchi rather than quietly buy a jar of it.

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

The manga-side release tracker, covering scanlation status and licensing across tens of thousands of series since 2001.

Millions of product manuals as PDFs, for the appliance whose paperwork went in the recycling back in 2011.

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.