🔧 Useful

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 big set of free PDF tools in the browser: merge, split, compress, convert and sign documents without creating an account first.

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.

Colorado's library of physics, chemistry and maths simulations, used in classrooms everywhere and free to meddle with.

Photoshop rebuilt in a tab, opening PSD, XCF and Sketch files. Free, and startlingly close to the real thing.

Sprite and animation editor with onion skinning and a live loop preview, exporting straight to a spritesheet or GIF.

Weather model charts for anywhere in the world, fast and free, of the sort forecasters look at rather than the tidied-up app version.

Grid, palette, mouse. The whole tool fits on one page and you are drawing about three seconds after it loads.

Draw on the grid and it writes the box-shadow monstrosity that renders your sprite with no image file involved at all.

Feed it a photograph and it hands back a pixel-art version, with block size and palette entirely under your control.

Open-source pixel editor with tilemaps, animation and 3D layers, playable in the browser or free to download properly.

Sprite editor with layers and animation frames, wrapped in an unusually friendly community gallery of other people's work.

Two editors in one — a quick one and a layered one — both free in the browser with the usual filters and masks.

Live flight tracking with an augmented-reality view, for pointing a phone at whatever just went over the garden and naming it.

A virtual table with real decks you drag around by hand, for playing whatever house rules your group refuses to drop.

Spin up a private poker table and send the link round: no accounts, no downloads and no actual money involved.

Clean, fast and mobile-first, with a front page that reads more like a curated shelf than a dump of everything uploaded.

Twenty-five minute cycles with a running log of what you spent each one on, in case you need the evidence later.

A pomodoro timer with a task list bolted on, which is roughly the entire feature set anybody actually uses.

A free browser extension from the EFF that learns which trackers follow you from site to site and blocks them, with no lists to manage.

Threat-model-first advice from the community that succeeded PrivacyTools, so you pick tools for your actual risk rather than a vibe.

Open-source test results that compare how well each major browser resists tracking and fingerprinting, updated as new versions ship.

Opinionated lists of privacy-respecting software sorted by category, with stated reasons rather than affiliate links.

A daily leaderboard of new apps, sites and gadgets, upvoted by the people who make and use them. The place to spot a tool before everyone else does.

Seventy thousand public domain books, plain and free, from the oldest digital library on the internet.

The Vedic side of the practice: kundli, dasha periods and panchang, calculated free with the underlying reasoning shown.

Crowd-sourced feed of well-made and gloriously pointless websites, and the closest thing left to a modern stumble button.

A community-maintained open database of internet radio streams with no company behind it, which is why the odd little stations survive there.

A tidy directory of tens of thousands of broadcast stations by country, genre and topic, with nothing to sign up for before you press play.

Rain radar for most of the world with a past-and-future loop, which answers the question of whether to leave now in about four seconds.

A library of specific, doable kindness ideas and the research on why doing them helps the doer as much as the recipient.

Blows one image up into a multi-page halftone poster that you print at home and tape across an entire wall.