🔧 Useful

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

Photoshop in a browser tab, layers and all, and it opens Sketch and XD files too. One developer, no sign-up, ads pay for the whole 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.

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

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

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.

A short typing course with a certificate at the end, oddly motivating for something nobody will ever ask you to show.

Paste a spreadsheet, pick from chart types most tools refuse to offer, and export an editable vector file.

Thousands of marketing emails collected and searchable, which is the only sane way to go about designing one.

Every train on the British network with the signalling data attached: which loop it was held in, where it lost four minutes and why.

Amit Patel's tutorials on pathfinding, hexagonal grids and noise, with every parameter exposed as a slider you can ruin.

Wathan and Schoger's rules for making things look designed when you are not, in fact, a designer.

Builds a regular expression while explaining every token in a side panel and highlighting matches as you type. Ends a lot of guessing.

Cuts the background out of a photo in about five seconds, stray hairs included. Free at web resolution, no account needed.

Finds your nearest free community workshop where volunteers help you fix the thing instead of replacing it. Thousands worldwide now.

Translations shown inside real bilingual sentences, so you can see which option a person would actually use.

Rhymes, near rhymes, synonyms and usage examples — quietly the best tool available to anyone writing anything.

The definitive index of American roadside oddities: the giant fibreglass animals, the museums devoted to exactly one thing.

The percentage that launched a thousand arguments — the share of critics who were positive, which is not an average score.

Tells you the best three minutes to leave for the toilet during any film, and summarises exactly what you missed. Absurd, and it works.

Reverse image search tuned for illustration: hand it a cropped screenshot and it names the artist and the original post.

Indexes only independent personal websites whose owners submitted them. No content farms, because there is nothing there to farm.

Recipes that explain the science first and then tell you what to do. The food-lab pieces are why it has the reputation it has.

Random design briefs with a countdown attached, for when the problem is not skill but having nothing to work on.

An infinite canvas for rough diagrams and flows. Opens instantly with nothing to configure and no file to save first.

Full paint program in a tab — brushes, layers, filters and a stamp library — with nothing to install and nothing to pay.

The custom emoji every workplace eventually accumulates, downloadable as a pack. The party parrot is in there.

Millions of images and 3D scans from the Smithsonian's collections, released with no copyright restrictions at all.