🔧 Useful

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.

A huge, searchable index of AI tools sorted by the task they do, from writing cover letters to cleaning up audio. Useful and a little dizzying.

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.

World clocks, time-zone converters, sunrise and moon times, calendars and countdowns, all on one long-running and reliably accurate site.

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

A collection of single-purpose online tools for web makers, from favicon makers to CSS generators, sorted by topic and searchable in one box.

Drag in PNGs and JPEGs and they come back far smaller with no visible difference. Nothing else to learn.

A daily five-minute roundup of tech, science and programming news, with every issue also readable on the website.

A quick whiteboard in the browser: sketch boxes, arrows and doodles, share a link and draw together in real time without making an account.

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.

Practise typing by working through actual novels, so the warm-up leaves you a few pages of Dostoevsky instead of nonsense.

Races you against real people typing the same passage, which is the only known method of making a typing test tense.

A complete free typing course with lessons, tests and games, the sort of thing schools pay for and this one does not charge.

Typing practice on real open-source code, complete with the brackets and semicolons that ruin everyone's average.

Structured typing lessons with a hand diagram that shows precisely which finger you have been cheating with all along.

Old-school pattern library that explains the problem each interface pattern solves before it shows you examples.

High-resolution photographs from a huge community of photographers, free to download and use. Browse by topic or colour without signing up.

Ship positions and port arrivals on a fast, uncluttered map, ideal for watching a delivery of your own crawl across an ocean.

Infinite squared paper for sketching layouts and floor plans, with snapping and nothing else getting in the way.

Upload a file or paste a URL and get verdicts back from seventy-odd antivirus engines at once, along with what the file talks to.

Upscales artwork and photographs without the usual mush, using a network trained specifically on line work.

Wildfire incidents across the western United States, mapped and annotated in near real time by volunteers who sit listening to fire radio.

Climate averages for any city as gorgeous year-round charts: sunshine hours, muggy days, wind, and precisely when the good weather ends.

Forecasts built on a network of tens of thousands of amateur weather stations, so the reading is often from somebody on your actual street.

The planet chopped into three-metre squares, each given a three-word name, which is either brilliant or a licensing trap depending who you ask.

A relationship graph of everybody famous, cross-referenced far past the point of reason and updated constantly.

Instructions for very nearly anything, illustrated in that unmistakable cartoon style. The artwork alone justifies the visit.

A vast library of freely licensed photos, maps, diagrams and sound files, each with its licence spelled out. The picture shelf behind Wikipedia.

The free library of source texts — treaties, speeches and out-of-copyright novels, transcribed and proofread by hand.

Wikipedia with a readable layout, a proper contents sidebar and images that stop fighting the text.