🔧 Useful

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.

Drop in a photo, get a clean cut-out back. It handles hair, which is the part that used to take an hour.

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.

Deb Perelman cooking from a famously tiny New York kitchen since 2006, testing everything obsessively and writing about it well.

The original rumour desk, still patiently establishing whether the thing your uncle forwarded actually happened.

Klondike that loads in under a second, with nothing on the page except green baize and the cards.

The newsroom that trains other newsrooms to cover responses instead of problems, with a searchable tracker of the results.

Code typing drills across a dozen languages, where the indentation is handled for you and the punctuation certainly is not.

NASA's tracker for when the space station is visible from where you live, with sighting alerts by email.

Paste any text and it flashes one word at a time at a speed you pick, which is either speed reading or a mild trance.

Tilemap editor for small games — paint a level from a tileset, then export it straight into Godot or Unity.

Constructive journalism collected from other outlets into one free feed, so somebody else does all the sifting.

Compare image codecs side by side with a draggable split, and see precisely what each quality setting costs you.

Grades any public HTTPS server from A+ down to F and explains every single deduction. The reference test the whole industry quotes.

Public domain classics reset properly — typography fixed, typos corrected, covers designed — and then given away.

Search results passed through without the tracking, plus an option to open any result through a proxy so the site never sees your address.

Ask a sports question in plain English and get the actual numbers back with a chart. Ends pub arguments in about four seconds.

The planetarium in a browser tab — set your location and it shows exactly what is above you right now.

Round-the-clock video study rooms full of strangers revising in silence, with pomodoro timers ticking in the corner.

Tick off what is genuinely in your cupboards and it ranks the recipes you can make right now, with nothing missing.

Name something you liked and it returns things with the same texture, spanning films, books, music and games at once.

A collaborative database of example sentences translated across languages, better than any dictionary for context.

Train an image or sound classifier from your own webcam in about three minutes, no code involved. The clearest explanation of machine learning built.

The other GIF keyboard, with better tagging for reaction clips and a sticker library your phone already quietly uses.

Graded summaries of the terms you agreed to without reading, with the specific alarming clause quoted. Volunteer-run since 2012.

One click copies the Lenny face, the shrug or the look of disapproval to your clipboard, correctly escaped.

Type a word, pick from several hundred FIGlet fonts, and get the enormous ASCII banner your terminal deserves.

Daily edit of objects, gear and short videos picked by somebody with taste and no obvious interest in sponsorship.

The gentle way into fragment shaders, with every example editable in the page and redrawing itself as you type.