🔧 Useful

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.

Compress an image with a live before-and-after slider and every codec knob exposed. Runs entirely in the browser, so nothing is uploaded.

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.

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.

Every component you might need to build, with links to how twenty different design systems each named and handled it.

A reference of every chart type and what each is genuinely for, worth reading before defaulting to a bar chart.

Aggregates everything the music blogs posted today into one stream, which is how people found new records before playlists took over.

Jay Alammar's diagram-by-diagram walkthrough of the architecture underneath every modern language model.

Community-maintained film and television database with an open API, which is why half the apps you use are quietly built on it.

The listing that has catalogued live text MUDs since 1994, and still tells you which of them have people logged in tonight.

A hand-maintained index of free books online, run out of Penn since before search engines were any good.

Campaigns for the right to repair and runs community fixing parties, publishing the data on what breaks and why.

Ripped sprite sheets from thousands of games, sorted by console — half reference library, half nostalgia trap.

A crime you solve by writing database queries, and easily the least painful SQL tutorial ever built.

A free course that starts on the home row and builds up, with keyboard layouts for whichever language you actually type in.

Nearly a trillion saved web pages. Paste any address, pick a year, and see what was there — the single most important archive online.

One family documenting Chinese home cooking across two generations, with real detail on ingredients and what you can substitute.

Live positions and finder charts for planets, comets and asteroids, updated continuously and free of clutter.

Fifty years of home renovation broken into how-tos, with actual tradespeople explaining why the obvious shortcut fails.

Reverse image search that finds the oldest copy of a picture rather than visually similar ones. The tool for tracing where a photo began.

Drag in PNGs and JPEGs, get them back visibly identical and roughly seventy per cent smaller. Twenty files at a time, free.

The onion router straight from the people who maintain it — the browser download plus a plain-English account of how the relays work.

Paste a single screenshot and it names the anime, the episode and the exact timestamp. Unreasonably accurate for something free.

Tracks what you have watched across every service and tells you which episode is next in the series you abandoned in March.

Raw model output laid out for people who want to read the charts themselves, and the page hurricane watchers keep open all August.

The big one: broadcast radio, sport and podcasts from most of the world, free with adverts and no account needed to listen.

The tool behind half the interactive fiction of the past decade, running in the browser and learnable in about twenty minutes.