🔧 Useful

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.

A link aggregator about computing that anyone can read: smaller, quieter and more carefully tagged than the big tech news sites.

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.

Live positions of the world's merchant fleet, container ships down to tugs, most vessels with photographs taken by shore spotters.

Live map of which McDonald's ice cream machines are broken, built by repeatedly adding a sundae to a cart. Petty, rigorous, brilliant.

Industrial supply catalogue with half a million parts, organised so well that engineers browse it purely for pleasure.

Vocabulary drills built around clips of native speakers saying the phrase in an actual street.

Weighted average of professional reviews on a 0-100 scale, with the user score shown separately when the two disagree loudly.

Multi-model forecasts with a meteogram showing how confident the models actually are, which most weather apps quietly decline to admit.

Screenshot library of real mobile and web apps, organised by flow, so you can see how everybody else solved it first.

A search engine that crawls the web with its own bot rather than renting results from the giants, and does not track who is searching.

Search any molecule and spin its three-dimensional structure, with spectra and crystal data alongside it.

The typing test that made typing tests beautiful — endlessly configurable, instantly readable and quietly addictive.

Filters every streaming catalogue at once by genre, rating and service, then hands you exactly one thing to watch.

Type a band and get a cloud of other bands, positioned by how often listeners like both. Crude, ancient and still weirdly effective.

The open music encyclopedia much of the industry quietly relies on, editable by anybody and free of any label's marketing department.

The default anime and manga database and tracker since 2004, and the source of the scores everyone else ends up quoting.

Hundreds of calibrated soundscapes with ten-slider equalisers, built by an audio engineer who takes tinnitus relief seriously.

The American government's public database of missing and unidentified persons, searchable by absolutely anyone.

Every photograph, video and audio recording NASA has released, searchable and free to use for anything.

The searchable index of American federal records, running from founding documents to recently declassified memos.

The official Atlantic and Pacific hurricane advisories, cones of uncertainty and discussion notes written in plain prose by duty forecasters.

Board games rebuilt for a group on a video call, with each person playing from their own phone. Codenames and Wavelength included.

A morning briefing of good stories, written for people who want a news habit that does not ruin breakfast.

Thirty years of usability research written up plainly and still free to read, which is why everyone cites it.

Racing where the accelerator is your typing speed, making it the only competitive driving game that leaves you better at something.

Rain, wind, fan and coffee-shop loops you layer into one background mix, then save as a preset for the rest of the week.

Fast, minimal tracker that pings you the moment a followed episode airs. Open source and deliberately kept lightweight.

Minecraft skin editor with a 3D preview you can spin, plus a gallery of other people's skins to take apart and reuse.

The US National Weather Service radar, unstyled and authoritative, with warning polygons drawn straight over the raw returns.

Notebooks for building charts in the browser, with a public gallery of thousands you can fork and pull apart.

Search hundreds of thousands of scanned historical maps by place and date, held by libraries worldwide.

Where English words came from, sourced and dated, compiled by one man who has been at it since 2000.

Station listings for nearly every country, each with a playlist history so you can identify the track that finished before you looked up.