🔧 Useful

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.

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.

Multi-instrument piano roll in a browser, backed by thousands of user sequences you can open, pull apart and ruin.

Hand-curated index of several thousand active blogs, sorted by subject, for when you want writing rather than a feed.

A daily index of the free courses, audiobooks, films and ebooks scattered across the rest of the internet.

Scan a barcode and get ingredients, additives and a nutrition score from a database anyone can edit. Wikipedia for groceries.

A catalogue page for every book ever published, a good many of them borrowable straight in the browser.

A hand-drawn library of mix-and-match people, free for anything, and quietly the source of half the internet's illustrations.

Free, ad-free versions of the actual academic instruments, with the collected raw data published for anyone who wants to poke at it.

A free street-view guessing game with unlimited rounds, built for people unwilling to pay a monthly subscription to look at roads.

Open-source emoji set drawn by design students, free to use, and in several places noticeably better than the defaults.

Searches around a billion openly licensed images and audio files, with the licence terms attached to every single result.

Oxford's open charts on poverty, energy, health and war, with the underlying data downloadable from every single one.

Write creative code in one pane and watch it run in the next, with no install, no build step and no configuration.

John McLeod's encyclopedia of card game rules, covering every regional variant of everything and settling every dispute.

Recorded user flows from real products, so you can watch an onboarding happen rather than guess at how it went.

The old-school colour scheme designer: one wheel, a live preview page, and far more control than the modern tools.

A hand-drawn character builder in the Open Peeps style, producing an avatar that does not look machine-generated.

Every adoptable animal in a hundred thousand shelters, searchable by postcode, which is dangerous browsing after 11pm.

Sixteen questions sort you into one of Pew's nine American political groups, with a decade of real survey data behind every one.