🔧 Useful

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.

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.

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.

A dictionary of every word in every language, including etymologies, declension tables and regional slang.

The forecast as an animated map, with wind, waves, temperature and a dozen models to argue between, free and without an account.

Answers computed rather than retrieved: integrals, unit conversions, orbital mechanics and the nutritional content of a Mars bar.

Renders your text in every font installed on the machine at once, which is the fastest way ever devised to pick one.

A dictionary showing real usage, related words and examples pulled from the wild rather than agreed by committee.

Readings from thousands of air monitoring stations worldwide on one map, colour-coded from a calm green to a genuinely alarming maroon.

Free indicators for every country going back decades, with charts, maps and bulk downloads on each series.

Plain map and flag quizzes covering every continent, aimed at classrooms and quietly excellent for adults as well.

Widely reckoned the strongest reverse image search for faces, places and heavily cropped photos. Worth trying when TinEye finds nothing.

Unicode styling for places that forbid formatting, so bold and italic survive a paste into a profile bio.

The Norwegian met office's forecast, famously accurate across Scandinavia and unusually calm about admitting uncertainty everywhere else.

Satellite imagery refreshed through the day, with storm tracks, wildfire hotspots and rainfall radar layered over the top of it.

Real research that needs human eyes: classify galaxies, transcribe ships' logs or count penguins, and end up in a published paper.