// field notes from the good internet
The blog
Roundups and deep dives on the sites worth your time, researched the hard way, by actually using every single site.
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BBC Sound Effects Archive: 16,000 Sounds From a Century of Broadcasting
The BBC put over 16,000 sound effects from its archive online, searchable and free to download for personal, educational and research use. Steam trains included.
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Behance: Where Designers Show Their Work
Behance is Adobe's portfolio network for designers, illustrators and photographers. Browse millions of projects, build a free portfolio, and find freelance work.
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Blacklight: See Exactly Who Is Watching You On Any Website
Blacklight by The Markup scans any URL in real time and lists the ad trackers, third-party cookies, session recorders and fingerprinting scripts running on you.
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Cheatography: Thousands of One-Page Cheat Sheets, Free to Print
Cheatography hosts thousands of user-made one-page cheat sheets for software, programming languages, keyboard shortcuts and more, all free to view, download and print.
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Candy Box 2: The ASCII Game That Keeps Unfolding
Candy Box 2 opens as a candy counter with two buttons and quietly turns into a full ASCII RPG with quests, a forge and a world map. Free in any browser.
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Chronophoto: Guess What Year the Photo Was Taken
Chronophoto shows you a historical photo and asks for the year. Drag a slider, get scored on how close you were, and learn you know less than you thought.
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Class Central: The Search Engine for Every Free Online Course
Class Central indexes tens of thousands of free online courses from universities and companies, with reviews, rankings and lists of which ones still give free certificates.
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Color Hunt: A Daily Feed of Palettes You Can Actually Use
Color Hunt is a curated collection of four-color palettes, updated daily. Click a swatch to copy the hex code, no account, no color theory homework required.
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Connected Papers: See the Shape of a Research Field in One Graph
Connected Papers turns a single academic paper into a visual map of the work around it, so you can see a field's structure instead of chasing citations one by one.
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Cool Math Games: The Site That Beat Every School Firewall
Cool Math Games has served free browser games since 1997, survived the death of Flash, and still hosts the classics a generation played under the desk.
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Falling Fruit: A World Map of Free Food Growing in Public
Falling Fruit maps edible trees and forageable plants on public land worldwide, combining city tree inventories with sightings added by foragers. Free to browse.
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The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Greatest Physics Course, Free Online
Caltech publishes the complete Feynman Lectures on Physics online for free, all three volumes, properly typeset with real equations, figures and searchable text.
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Gapminder: The Bubble Chart That Rearranged How People See the World
Gapminder animates two centuries of global health, income and population data as moving bubbles, and quietly demolishes most of what people assume about the world.
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JetPunk: The Timed Quiz Site That Actually Teaches You the World Map
JetPunk hosts an enormous library of timed trivia quizzes, from naming every country to state capitals and flags. Type fast, run out of time, get slightly better.
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Keybr: The Typing Trainer That Targets the Keys You Keep Missing
Keybr watches which keys slow you down and generates practice words made mostly of those letters, adding new keys only once you have earned them.
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Laws of UX: The Psychology Behind Good Interfaces, In One Place
Laws of UX collects the psychological principles that govern how people use interfaces, Fitts's Law, Hick's Law, Jakob's Law, each explained clearly and cited.
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Learn X in Y Minutes: Every Programming Language as One Commented File
Learn X in Y Minutes teaches 100+ programming languages as a single heavily-commented source file each. No videos, no signup, no chapter one about installing things.
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NationStates: Run a Country One Absurd Decision at a Time
NationStates hands you a nation and a steady drip of political dilemmas. Every answer warps your economy, your civil rights and your government's label.
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Nestflix: A Streaming Catalogue of Movies That Do Not Exist
Nestflix is a Netflix-style library of the fake films and TV shows found inside real ones, complete with posters, cast lists and the productions they came from.
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OneZoom Tree of Life: Every Species on One Infinite Fractal
OneZoom maps the evolutionary relationships between 2.2 million species as a single zoomable fractal tree. Free, open source, and genuinely hard to stop scrolling.
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PCPartPicker: The Build Planner That Stops You Buying the Wrong Part
PCPartPicker checks that every component in your PC build actually fits together, then compares live prices across retailers so you pay the least for it.
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Polotno Studio: A Canva Alternative With No Signup At All
Polotno Studio is a free browser design editor for social graphics, posters and flyers. It opens straight into the canvas, no account, no watermark, no upsell.
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Privacy Guides: The Recommendation List That Isn't Selling You Anything
Privacy Guides is a non-commercial, community-maintained directory of privacy-respecting software and services, built around threat modeling instead of paranoia.
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Raindrop.io: The Bookmark Manager That Makes Saved Links Findable Again
Raindrop.io organizes bookmarks into nested collections with tags, previews and real search, so the links you save actually turn up when you need them.
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Semantic Scholar: A Search Engine That Reads the Papers
Semantic Scholar is a free academic search engine that shows you why a paper was cited, summarizes it in one line, and does not care whether you have a subscription.
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ShadeMap: See Exactly Where the Shadows Fall, at Any Hour of Any Day
ShadeMap simulates sun and shadow on a world map for any date and time, using terrain and building data. Free to use for checking light before you commit.
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SlidesCarnival: Free Slide Templates That Don't Look Free
SlidesCarnival offers hundreds of free, genuinely well-designed templates for Google Slides and PowerPoint, with matching fonts, palettes and icon sets included.
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SQLZoo: Learn SQL by Actually Writing SQL
SQLZoo teaches SQL through graded exercises you run against real tables in the browser. No videos, no signup, no database to install, just queries and results.
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Terms of Service; Didn't Read: The Fine Print, Graded and Translated
ToS;DR summarizes the terms of service of major websites into plain-English points and letter grades, so you can find out what you agreed to without reading 40 pages.
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WorldCat: Search Every Library in the World at Once
WorldCat searches the catalogs of thousands of libraries worldwide in one query, then tells you which ones near you actually have the book on the shelf.
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Conserve the Sound: An Audio Museum of Things That Don't Exist Anymore
Conserve the Sound is an online museum preserving the noises of obsolete objects: rotary phones, typewriters, film projectors and the dial-up modem handshake.
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Floor796: The Animated Space Station Floor That Never Stops Growing
Floor796 is one enormous hand-animated scene of life on the 796th floor of a space station, drawn by a single person and packed with pop-culture cameos.
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Homestar Runner: The Flash Cartoon That Refused to Die
Homestar Runner has been making free web cartoons since 2000, survived the death of Flash, and still posts new episodes. Strong Bad, Trogdor and all.
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ImportYeti: Look Up Which Factories a Company Actually Buys From
ImportYeti turns US customs records into a searchable database, so you can see which overseas suppliers ship to a given company and how much they send.
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Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music: The Family Tree, With Opinions
Ishkur's Guide maps every electronic music subgenre into a playable, annotated family tree, with sample tracks and commentary that is frequently very rude.
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Noclip: Fly Through the Maps of Classic Video Games in Your Browser
Noclip loads the actual levels of dozens of classic games into your browser and hands you a free-flying camera. No console, no game, no collision detection.
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OneLook Reverse Dictionary: Describe It and Get the Word
OneLook's reverse dictionary finds the word you cannot remember. Describe the concept in plain English and it returns the terms that match your description.
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OpenStax: Real College Textbooks, Peer-Reviewed and Genuinely Free
OpenStax publishes peer-reviewed college textbooks in math, science, social science and business, free to read online or download, openly licensed and reusable.
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Pointer Pointer: Photographs of People Pointing at Your Cursor
Put your mouse anywhere on Pointer Pointer and it finds a real photograph of a person pointing at exactly that spot. That is the entire website, and it works.
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River Runner: Follow a Raindrop From Anywhere to the Sea
River Runner lets you drop a raindrop anywhere on Earth and fly along its exact path downstream, through every creek and river, all the way to the ocean.
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Sandboxels: A Falling-Sand Sandbox That Actually Does Chemistry
Sandboxels is a browser falling-sand game with hundreds of elements, real temperature and reactions. Drop sand, then set it on fire and see what it becomes.
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StillTasty: The Shelf Life Database That Settles the Fridge Argument
StillTasty tells you how long thousands of foods keep in the pantry, fridge and freezer, opened or unopened, and whether the thing in your hand is still safe.
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Ventusky: The Weather Map That Actually Looks Like Weather
Ventusky animates global wind, rain, temperature and pressure across a smooth timeline, with multiple forecast models and a clarity most weather maps never manage.
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BookFinder: Search Every Bookseller at Once, New, Used or Rare
BookFinder searches millions of new, used and out-of-print books across thousands of sellers at once, comparing total prices including shipping to your country.
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MetaFilter: The Community Weblog That Outlasted the Internet
MetaFilter is a human-moderated community weblog where members post the best things they find online. No algorithm, no engagement metrics, running since 1999.
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Webamp: Winamp 2.9, Rebuilt Pixel by Pixel in Your Browser
Webamp is a working reimplementation of Winamp 2.9 that runs in a browser tab, plays your own audio files, and supports the original classic skins.
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Zombo.com: The Immortal Splash Page Where You Can Do Anything
Zombo.com is a 1999 parody of Flash intro pages that never actually starts. Spinning discs, a warm voice, and the promise that anything is possible.
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TV Garden: Spin a Globe and Watch Live TV From Anywhere
TV Garden puts thousands of free live television channels on a spinning globe. Click a country, get whatever is broadcasting there right now, no account needed.
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Windows 93: A Fake Operating System That Never Existed
Windows 93 is a browser-based parody OS from an alternate 1993, full of broken apps, hidden games and jokes. Boot it up and start opening things you shouldn't.
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Space Jam 1996: The Movie Website That Outlived the Web Around It
The original 1996 Space Jam promo site is still online, tiled starfield and all. Warner Bros. preserved it at spacejam.com/1996 instead of deleting it.
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10 Minute Mail: A Disposable Inbox With a Countdown Timer
10 Minute Mail hands you a working email address that deletes itself ten minutes later. No signup, no password, no newsletter chasing you for years.
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100,000 Stars: Fly Through Our Corner of the Galaxy
100,000 Stars is a browser visualization of the nearest hundred thousand stars, letting you zoom from the Sun out to the shape of the Milky Way in one move.
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Acko.net: Where Math and Graphics Get Explained in WebGL
Acko.net is Steven Wittens's long-running blog on graphics, math and code, where explanations arrive as interactive 3D visualizations instead of static diagrams.
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Addicting Games: The Portal That Ate the Computer Lab
Addicting Games has been serving free browser games since the early 2000s. It survived the death of Flash and still runs thousands of titles with no install.
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Acts of Gord: Retail Horror Written as Scripture
Acts of Gord is the collected chronicles of a video game store owner, written in mock-biblical prose. Twenty-plus years old and still the best retail writing online.
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AdjustableTimer: A Countdown in a Browser Tab, Nothing Else
AdjustableTimer is a plain countdown timer that runs in any browser tab. No app, no account, no notification permissions. You set a time and it counts down.
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Algebra Rules: Every Rule You Forgot, On One Page
Algebra Rules collects the essential rules of basic algebra on a single clean page, each one linked to examples. No ads, no video, no cookie banner, just the rules.
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Albino Blacksheep: The Flash Archive That Refused to Die
Albino Blacksheep has hosted web animations, games and music since 1999. It outlived Flash itself and still serves the cartoons that defined the early internet.
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Arngren: The Most Chaotic Web Layout Ever Built
Arngren.net is a Norwegian gadget shop whose homepage is a wall of overlapping images, clashing fonts and mini scooters. It has looked this way for decades.
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Arts & Letters Daily: The Web's Longest-Running Reading List
Arts & Letters Daily has posted three columns of curated essays, criticism and book reviews since 1998, in a layout that has barely changed and does not need to.
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BestSimilar: Name Something You Loved, Get Something Like It
BestSimilar takes a film, show, book, game or band you already like and returns a ranked list of genuinely similar ones, with the reasons spelled out in tags.
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Big Rat: There Is a Big Rat and You Should See It
bigrat.monster is a website with a big rat on it. There is music. There is nothing else. It is one of the purest single-serving sites on the internet.
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Bitey Castle: The Brackenwood Animations and Their Long, Strange Home
Bitey Castle is Adam Phillips's site, home of the Brackenwood animation series. Hand-drawn, beautifully animated, and unlike anything else the Flash era produced.
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Bored Day: 150+ Tiny Browser Games for a Five-Minute Gap
Bored Day is a grid of small free browser games, puzzles, reaction tests, doodle tools and novelty toys, that load instantly with no account and no install.
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Brat Generator: Make the Lime-Green Album Cover in Ten Seconds
Brat Generator recreates the blurred lime-green Brat album cover with any text you like. Type a word, download a PNG, and you are done. Free, no signup.
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CelebHeights: The Obsessive Database of How Tall Everyone Actually Is
CelebHeights has spent two decades documenting the gap between claimed and actual celebrity heights, with photo evidence, estimates and ferocious comment threads.
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Caps-a-holic: Which Blu-ray Release Actually Looks Best
Caps-a-holic puts screenshots from different Blu-ray, 4K and DVD releases of the same film side by side, so you can see exactly which transfer is worth buying.
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CERN Line Mode Browser: The Web Exactly As It Was Invented
A faithful in-browser emulation of the 1990s Line Mode Browser, rendering the world's first website as numbered text links on a black terminal screen.
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Cleverbot: The Chatbot That Blew Everyone's Mind Before LLMs
Cleverbot has been holding strange, circular conversations with the internet since 1997, learning every reply from the humans who talked to it. It still works.
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Cloudhiker: The StumbleUpon Successor That Actually Curates
Cloudhiker sends you to a hand-reviewed interesting website with one click. Thousands of sites across 19 categories, no clickbait, no algorithmic slop.
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Cockeyed: One Man's Lifelong Archive of Pointless, Rigorous Experiments
Cockeyed.com is Rob Cockerham's decades-deep collection of homemade experiments, pranks, costumes and obsessive measurements of how much is inside things.
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Crouton: It Is a Crouton. You Click It. It Becomes a Different Crouton.
Crouton.net shows you a crouton. Click it and a different crouton appears. That is the whole website, and it has been quietly doing this for years.
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Cult of the Party Parrot: The Canonical Archive of Workplace Chaos
Cult of the Party Parrot collects hundreds of animated party parrot emoji, free to download for Slack and Discord, all descended from one enthusiastic kakapo.
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Dan-Ball: Powder Game and a Deep Catalog of Physics Sandboxes
Dan-Ball is the home of Powder Game, Stick Ranger and a long catalog of Japanese browser physics sandboxes, all free, all still updated, all built by one developer.
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Dark Site Finder: A Light Pollution Map for Finding Real Darkness
Dark Site Finder overlays light pollution data on a world map so you can find the nearest place dark enough to actually see the Milky Way. Free, no account.
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Dear Next Visitor: Read a Stranger's Note, Leave One Behind
Dear Next Visitor gives you a message written by the previous visitor, but only after you write one for the next. One message in, one message out.
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Down For Everyone Or Just Me: The One-Question Website
Down For Everyone Or Just Me checks whether a site is genuinely offline or whether the problem is at your end. One box, one answer, no account required.
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Dragon Cave: The Dragon-Breeding Game That Has Run Since 2006
Dragon Cave lets you adopt dragon eggs that only hatch when enough strangers look at them. It has been running quietly since 2006 and people still play daily.
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Drama Button: One Big Red Button, Maximum Dramatic Sting
Drama Button is a giant red button that plays an orchestral dun-dun-dunnn on demand. No signup, no setup, just an instant soundtrack for someone else's news.
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Drive Me Insane: Turn On a Stranger's Lights Since 1997
Drive Me Insane lets anyone on the internet flip the lights, drive an RC car and pan the cameras in one man's house. It has been running since 1997.
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Eel Slap: One Man, One Eel, Infinite Slaps
Eel Slap is a website where you drag your mouse to slap a man in the face with an eel. There is no score, no goal and no second page. That is all of it.
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Everything2: The Encyclopedia That Wanted to Be Literature
Everything2 is a writing community from 1999 where entries are essays, memoir and poetry rather than neutral facts. It predates Wikipedia and is still running.
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Existential Comics: Philosophy Jokes That Are Also a Philosophy Course
Existential Comics is a long-running webcomic where dead philosophers bicker in bars and video games, with a plain-English explainer under every strip.
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Fark: Twenty-Five Years of Absurd News Headlines
Fark has been curating the internet's stupidest real news since 1999, filtered through tag categories like Florida, Obvious and Asinine, with a comment section to match.
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Flag Match: Learn Every Country's Flag by Playing Concentration
Flag Match is a free timed matching game that pairs world flags with country names. Play a few rounds a day and you will actually learn all 236 of them.
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Fold 'N Fly: A Searchable Database of Paper Airplane Designs
Fold 'N Fly collects dozens of paper airplane designs with step-by-step diagrams and videos, sorted by difficulty and by whether you want distance, air time or tricks.
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Forebears: Find Out How Rare Your Surname Actually Is
Forebears maps surname and given-name frequency across the world, showing how common your family name is and which countries it clusters in.
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Frequency 2156: Tuning Into Earth's Radio, 130 Years From Now
Frequency 2156 is a collaborative sound project: a fictional radio broadcast from the year 2156, built from clips strangers recorded and sent into the dark.
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Futility Closet: An Idler's Miscellany of Compendious Amusements
Futility Closet is a vast archive of historical curiosities, mathematical oddities, wordplay and lateral thinking puzzles, posted daily for two decades.
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gail.com: The FAQ of a Woman Who Will Not Sell You Her Domain
gail.com is where you land when you mistype gmail.com. Its owner answered the resulting questions in one dry, patient FAQ, and no, it is not for sale.
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GeekTyper: Pick a Hacking Interface and Mash the Keyboard
GeekTyper lets you choose from dozens of fictional hacking interfaces, then fills the screen with code as you mash any keys. Pure movie-hacker theater, free.
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Geotastic: The Free Geography Guessing Game With Friends
Geotastic drops you in a random street view and asks where you are. Free, crowdfunded, multiplayer, with flag, country and elevation modes alongside the classic.
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Gizoogle: The Snoop Dogg Translator That Refuses to Die
Gizoogle rewrites any website or block of text in Snoop Dogg's vernacular. It launched in the early 2000s, it still works, and it is still very funny.
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Global Grey eBooks: Public Domain Classics That Are Actually Nice to Read
Global Grey is a one-woman library of thousands of free public domain ebooks in PDF, EPUB and Kindle formats, each one hand-formatted rather than machine-dumped.
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Gnoosic: Name Three Bands, Get One You've Never Heard Of
Gnoosic asks for three bands you love, then guesses artists you might like one at a time. No account, no algorithmic feed, just a very old website with good taste.
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Goldfishies: A Browser Tab That Is Just an Aquarium
Goldfishies is a virtual fish tank that runs in your browser. Fish drift, food drops when you click, and nothing else ever happens. That is the appeal.
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Google Morse Code Trainer: Learn the Whole Alphabet in One Sitting
Google's Morse Typing Trainer teaches the full Morse alphabet through mnemonic images and short repeated drills. It is free, browser-based and startlingly effective.
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Hacksplaining: Learn Web Security by Breaking Things First
Hacksplaining teaches web vulnerabilities through interactive lessons where you run the attack yourself, then fix it. Free, no setup, about 20 minutes per topic.
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Hex Clock: A Clock That Is Also a Color
Hex Clock shows the time as a six-digit hex code and paints the whole page that color. It changes every second, and the palette is quietly beautiful.
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HeyJackass: The Unofficial Ledger of Chicago Crime Statistics
HeyJackass tracks Chicago shootings and homicides in relentless statistical detail, updated year-round with charts, breakdowns and unsparing commentary.
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Hollywood Age Gap: The Database of Uncomfortable Casting Decisions
Hollywood Age Gap lists the age difference between actors playing love interests on screen, film by film. The pattern it reveals is hard to unsee.
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Homicide Monitor: The World's Lethal Violence, Mapped Country by Country
The Igarapé Institute's Homicide Monitor maps homicide rates worldwide by country and city, broken down by gender, age and weapon, with data free to download.
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Hooktheory TheoryTab: The Chord Progressions of Real Songs, Analyzed
TheoryTab is a searchable library of thousands of chord progressions transcribed from real songs, written in a key-independent notation so you can see why they work.
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How Many People Are In Space Right Now: A Live Headcount Off Earth
This site answers one question and answers it well: how many humans are currently in space, who they are, which craft they are on, and how long they have been up there.
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I Has A Bucket: A Shrine to One Walrus and His Bucket
I Has A Bucket is a single page preserving one of the internet's oldest surviving image macros: a walrus, a blue bucket and some very bad grammar.
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Ian's Shoelace Site: The Definitive Archive of Tying Your Shoes
Ian's Shoelace Site catalogues dozens of lacing methods and knots, with diagrams, comparisons and a genuinely better bow that will not come undone.
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Image Colour Transfer: Steal One Photo's Palette for Another
Image Colour Transfer takes the color character of one photograph and applies it to another, entirely in your browser, with several algorithms to compare.
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IMCDb: Every Car in Every Movie, Identified by Obsessives
The Internet Movie Cars Database catalogs the vehicles appearing in films and TV shows, down to the model year, with screenshots and heated comment-section debate.
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IMG_0001: The Videos People Uploaded to YouTube by Accident
IMG_0001 collects millions of camera-roll clips that old iPhones quietly published to YouTube, and plays them at random on a virtual television set.
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Incognitube: YouTube Videos Almost Nobody Has Ever Watched
Incognitube surfaces YouTube videos with essentially zero views. Unedited, untitled, uploaded and forgotten, it is the strangest corner of the platform.
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Infinite Chef: Combine Ingredients Until You Discover Everything
Infinite Chef is a browser cooking sandbox where you mix, heat and chop ingredients to unlock an enormous branching tree of recipes. No account, no timer.
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Inkarnate: Paint a Fantasy World in Your Browser
Inkarnate is a browser-based map maker for fantasy worlds, dungeons and city streets, with painted textures and stamps that make amateur maps look professional.
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iPiccy: The Photo Editor That Opens Before Photoshop Loads
iPiccy is a free browser photo editor with retouching, filters, collages and basic design tools. No install, no account, and it opens in about a second.
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Is It Christmas? The Web's Most Reliable Answer to One Question
Is It Christmas? answers a single question in one enormous word. It has been correct every day since it launched, which is more than most websites can claim.
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Is It Friday Yet? The Web's Most Honest Answer to a Simple Question
Is It Friday Yet? is a single-serving website that does exactly one thing: tells you whether today is Friday. No ads, no signup, no ambiguity.
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Ishtar Collective: Destiny's Entire Lore, Beautifully Organized
Ishtar Collective is a fan-built archive of every lore card, transcript and grimoire entry from Destiny, cross-linked, searchable and free to read.
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JAZZRADIO: Dozens of Human-Curated Jazz Channels That Just Play
JAZZRADIO runs dozens of curated jazz channels split by style and mood, from bebop to bossa nova to piano trios. Free to listen, no account needed to start.
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judyrecords: Full-Text Search Across Hundreds of Millions of Court Cases
judyrecords lets you search the full text of hundreds of millions of United States court cases for free, with no account, no paywall and no per-document fees.
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Just the Recipe: Paste a URL, Skip the Life Story
Just the Recipe strips a recipe page down to ingredients and instructions. Paste the link, get the cooking, leave behind the essay about a grandmother's kitchen.
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Khushmeen Doodle Icons: Hand-Drawn Icons, Free, No Attribution
Khushmeen's icon set is a huge collection of hand-drawn doodle icons, free for personal and commercial use with no attribution required and no sign-up.
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Komoot: Route Planning Built on Trails People Actually Walked
Komoot plans hiking and cycling routes using community-verified trail data, with surface types, elevation and turn-by-turn voice navigation that works offline.
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Krunker: A Fast Multiplayer Shooter That Runs in a Browser Tab
Krunker is a free browser-based first-person shooter with no download and no install. Open a tab, pick a class, and you are in a match in seconds.
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LifeMap: The Entire Tree of Life, Navigated Like Google Maps
LifeMap renders the whole tree of life as a zoomable map. Start at the last universal common ancestor and pan outward through hundreds of thousands of species.
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Ling's Cars: The Loudest Website on Earth Is a Real Business
Ling's Cars is a genuine UK car leasing company hiding behind the most chaotic, GIF-saturated, deliberately hideous website ever built. It works, and it sells cars.
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Link Cleaner: Strip the Tracking Junk Out of Any URL
Link Cleaner removes utm tags, referral IDs and click trackers from URLs, leaving a short clean link that goes to the same place without reporting on anyone.
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Listen to Wikipedia: Every Edit on Earth, Played as a Note
Listen to Wikipedia turns the live stream of Wikipedia edits into sound: a bell for every addition, a string pluck for every deletion, pitched by edit size.
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Literature Map: A Constellation of Authors You Might Actually Like
Type any author into Literature Map and it draws a cloud of writers whose readers overlap with theirs. The closer the name, the likelier the match. Free, instant, no account.
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Littler Books: Nonfiction Summaries That Get Straight to the Point
Littler Books condenses well-known nonfiction titles into sharp bullet-point summaries you can read in about twelve minutes, with free web versions and PDFs.
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LittleSis: The Free Database of Who the Powerful Know
LittleSis maps the connections between billionaires, executives, politicians and board seats. A free, citation-backed who-knows-who of the powerful.
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LiveATC: Listen to Air Traffic Control From Airports Worldwide
LiveATC streams live air traffic control radio from hundreds of airports, fed by volunteers with receivers on their roofs. Free to listen, endlessly absorbing.
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Liveuamap: Breaking Events, Pinned to the Map They Happened On
Liveuamap plots conflict and breaking news onto live maps, each marker sourced from a geolocated open-source report you can click through and check yourself.
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LoFi ATC: Air Traffic Control Chatter Over Lo-Fi Beats
LoFi ATC layers live air traffic control radio from airports worldwide over lo-fi hip hop. Pick an airport, set the mix, and get an unreasonably good focus soundtrack.
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Making Software: Illustrated Explanations of How Computers Actually Work
Making Software explains the guts of software and hardware, anti-aliasing, color, GPUs, displays, using illustrations and animations instead of walls of text.
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MapChart: Color In Your Own Maps and Export Them
MapChart lets you click countries, states or regions to color them, add a legend and title, then download the finished map as an image. No account needed.
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monkeys.zip: The Infinite Monkey Theorem, Actually Running
monkeys.zip is a live simulation of the infinite monkey theorem, with thousands of virtual monkeys hammering keys and being checked against the works of Shakespeare.
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MovieLens: Film Recommendations From a University Research Lab
MovieLens recommends films based purely on your own ratings, with no ads and nothing to sell you. It is run as a research project, not a streaming service.
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Music-Map: A Cloud of Similar Bands Where Distance Means Difference
Music-Map takes any artist and draws a cloud of related names around it, positioned so closer means more similar. One search, thirty leads, no algorithm feed.
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My Retro TVs: Channel Surfing Through Decades of Old Television
My Retro TVs puts a rendered vintage television in your browser and lets you turn the dial through archived programming from the 1950s to the 1990s.
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NASA Deep Space Network Now: Watch NASA Talk to Spacecraft Live
DSN Now shows which antennas are contacting which spacecraft right this second, with live signal strength and data rates. Voyager 1 is usually on there.
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Natural Language Playlist: Describe a Vibe, Get an Actual Playlist
Natural Language Playlist turns a plain-English description, however specific or absurd, into a real Spotify playlist. No genres, no seed artists, just a sentence.
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Nice Game Hints: Get Unstuck Without Getting Spoiled
Nice Game Hints gives puzzle-game help in graded steps, from a gentle nudge to the full answer, so you can take exactly as much help as you need.
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Nikon Small World: The Most Beautiful Photographs Nobody Can See
Nikon Small World is the annual gallery of the world's best microscope photography, decades of winning images from a competition running since 1975, free to browse.
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Ninja Burger: The Fast Food Chain That Delivers by Stealth
Ninja Burger is an elaborate fake fast-food franchise staffed by ninjas, online since 1999. Guaranteed delivery in 30 minutes or less, or the driver commits seppuku.
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Nobody.live: Watch the Twitch Streams Nobody Is Watching
Nobody.live finds live Twitch streams with zero viewers and drops you into one at random. You are the entire audience, and they usually notice.
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Notepad: A Blank Page in Your Browser, No Account Required
Notepad is a browser tab that behaves like a text file. Open it, type, close it, come back later and your text is still there. No login, no sync, no clutter.
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OJAD Pitch Accent Dictionary: The Missing Half of Japanese Pronunciation
OJAD is a free University of Tokyo tool that shows Japanese pitch accent for words, conjugated forms and entire sentences, with audio and drawn pitch curves.
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OMFGDOGS: An Endless Herd of Dogs Running Across Your Screen
OMFGDOGS is a single-purpose website that fills your browser with an infinite stampede of running dogs set to relentlessly upbeat music. That is the whole site.
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Oyster: Hotel Photos Nobody Was Allowed to Retouch
Oyster sends its own reviewers to hotels, photographs everything unedited, and publishes the results next to the marketing shots the hotel would prefer you saw.
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PDFescape: Edit, Fill and Annotate PDFs Without Installing Anything
PDFescape is a browser-based PDF editor for filling forms, adding text, annotating and rearranging pages. No install, no Acrobat license, works on any machine.
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Peter's Evil Overlord List: The 100 Rules of Not Losing
Peter's Evil Overlord List is the 1990s internet classic cataloging every mistake fictional villains make, from monologuing to unguarded ventilation shafts.
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Petit Tube: YouTube Videos That Almost Nobody Has Seen
Petit Tube plays a continuous stream of YouTube videos with almost no views, the accidental uploads and pocket recordings at the bottom of the platform.
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PimEyes: The Face Search Engine You Should Probably Run on Yourself
PimEyes searches the web for photos of a face. It is unsettling, genuinely useful for auditing your own exposure, and it offers an opt-out you may want to use.
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Pixilart: Draw Pixel Art in a Tab, Then Look at Everyone Else's
Pixilart is a free browser pixel art editor with layers, animation and palettes, attached to a large community gallery of other people's sprites and scenes.
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Plane Crash Info: Last Words, an Archive of Final Cockpit Transcripts
Plane Crash Info collects the final recorded words from aviation accidents, drawn from official cockpit voice recorder transcripts. Sobering, factual and unsensational.
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Popcat: Clicking a Cat for National Glory
Popcat is a website where you click a cat's face, it makes a popping sound, and your country climbs a global leaderboard. That is genuinely the whole thing.
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PostSecret: Strangers Mailing In Their Secrets, Every Sunday
PostSecret publishes anonymous secrets that people write on homemade postcards and mail to a house in Maryland. New ones go up every Sunday, free to read.
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Presidential Ham: Every US President, Painted Holding a Ham
Presidential Ham is an art project in which every president of the United States has been painted in oils holding a ham. No justification is offered anywhere.
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Procatinator: Random Cat GIFs Wedded to Random Songs
Procatinator pairs a looping cat GIF with a random song clip. Most combinations are nonsense. Occasionally one lands so perfectly it feels intentional.
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PurpleAir Map: Air Quality From the Sensor on Your Neighbor's Roof
PurpleAir shows live air-quality readings from thousands of citizen-owned sensors worldwide, often street by street. Free to browse, no account needed.
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Puter: A Whole Desktop Operating System in a Browser Tab
Puter is an open-source 'internet computer': a full desktop with windows, a file manager, apps and cloud storage, running entirely inside a browser tab.
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Python for Everybody: The Free Course That Actually Teaches Beginners
Python for Everybody is Dr. Charles Severance's complete free Python course: video lectures, an open textbook, autograded exercises, and no paywall anywhere.
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Quiver Quantitative Congress Trading: Every Stock Trade Congress Discloses
Quiver Quantitative turns the disclosure filings of US senators and representatives into a searchable feed of stock trades, by legislator and by ticker.
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RambleFix: Talk Nonsense, Get Clean Text Back
RambleFix lets you speak into your mic without planning a sentence, then uses AI to turn the meandering result into tidy written text you can actually send.
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Read Something Interesting: One Button, One Genuinely Good Article
Read Something Interesting is one button that sends you to a random hand-picked blog post or essay. No feed, no algorithm, just one good thing to read.
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Real Ultimate Power: The Ninja Website That Invented a Genre
Real Ultimate Power is a 2002 fan site about ninjas, written in the voice of an unhinged ten-year-old. It is still online and still completely committed.
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RegExr: The Regex Playground That Explains Itself
RegExr lets you build and test regular expressions with live match highlighting, a token-by-token explanation panel and a searchable community pattern library.
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Rooms.xyz: Build Tiny Interactive 3D Worlds in Your Browser
Rooms.xyz lets you assemble little 3D rooms from a library of objects, add interactivity, and remix anyone else's creation. No modeling skills required.
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Same Energy: A Search Engine for Images That Feel Alike
Same Energy is a visual search engine. Give it an image and it returns others with the same mood, palette and texture, not the same keywords.
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Samorost: The Free Browser Game That Started Amanita Design
Samorost is a short, strange point-and-click adventure set on a tiny wooden asteroid. It began as a student project and it is still free to play in a browser.
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Sentinel Playground: Satellite Imagery of Anywhere, In Any Band You Want
Sentinel Playground opens up free Sentinel satellite imagery in a browser: pick a spot, pick a date, and switch between visual, infrared and vegetation bands.
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Should See This: A Hand-Picked Tour of the Interesting Web
Should See This is a curated collection of the cool, weird and genuinely useful corners of the internet, organized so you can browse instead of doomscroll.
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Silex: A Drag-and-Drop Site Builder That Hands You the HTML
Silex is a free, open-source website builder with a visual drag-and-drop editor that exports clean static HTML, CSS and JavaScript you own outright.
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SimplyScripts: A Free Library of Real Movie and TV Scripts
SimplyScripts indexes thousands of free movie, TV, anime and radio scripts, so you can read how the films you love were actually written before they were shot.
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Staggering Beauty: A Wiggly Worm With a Serious Warning
Staggering Beauty is a black rubbery worm that follows your cursor. Move gently and it is charming. Shake it hard and the site escalates dramatically.
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suckless.org: Software That Does Less, On Purpose
suckless.org is home to dwm, st, dmenu and a philosophy of radical minimalism. Tiny C programs, configured by editing the source and recompiling.
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TasteDive: Recommendations That Cross Between Media
TasteDive takes a band, film, book or game you like and suggests similar things across every category, including ones you did not ask about.
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Temp Mail: A Throwaway Inbox for Every Signup You Regret
Temp Mail gives you a disposable email address and a live inbox in one click, so you can confirm a download without joining a mailing list for the rest of your life.
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Territorial.io: The Map Conquest Game That Looks Like Nothing and Eats Your Evening
Territorial.io is a free browser strategy game where hundreds of players carve up a map with a single slider. It looks trivial. It is not remotely trivial.
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The Bored Button: One Button, Infinite Nonsense
The Bored Button is a single red button that throws you at a random game, toy or oddity. No menu, no categories, no way to know what happens next.
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The Cube Rule of Food: A Deadpan Taxonomy That Settles Everything
The Cube Rule classifies food by which faces of a cube hold starch. It concludes that a hot dog is a taco and pizza is toast, and it will not be negotiating.
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The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A 17th-Century Life, Published One Day at a Time
The Diary of Samuel Pepys publishes the 1660s diary as a daily blog, annotated by readers, so you follow plague, fire and gossip at the pace Pepys lived it.
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The Nicest Place on the Internet: A Website That Only Hugs You
The Nicest Place on the Internet plays an endless loop of strangers reaching through the screen to give you a hug. No feed, no comments, no argument.
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The Physics of the Universe: Cosmology Explained Without the Math
A one-man reference site that walks through the Big Bang, black holes, quantum theory and relativity in plain English, with a glossary and a full timeline.
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The Red Hand Files: Nick Cave Answers Strangers, Unfiltered
Anyone can ask Nick Cave anything and he answers publicly, at length, with no interviewer in the way. Grief, songwriting, faith, and the occasional absurd question.
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The Useful Website: A Hand-Built Directory of Sites Worth Knowing
The Useful Website is a curated directory of genuinely useful sites, sorted into plain categories with no ads, no algorithm and no infinite scroll.
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TiiiME: Exactly How Many Days of Your Life That Show Will Cost
TiiiME adds up every episode of a TV series and tells you the total in days, weeks and hours. A single number, delivered without sympathy, before you commit.
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Time and Date: The Reference Desk for Every Question About When
timeanddate.com handles time zones, meeting planning, calendars, sunrise tables, eclipses and date math. Unglamorous, comprehensive, and correct about DST.
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TypeRacer: Competitive Typing Against Actual Humans
TypeRacer drops you into a live race against other people, typing a passage as fast as you can. Free, browser-based, and quietly addictive for years.
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Unicode Snowman For You: A Domain Name, A Snowman, Nothing Else
Unicode Snowman For You is a website whose entire content is one giant snowman character. The source code, however, is a small monument to overengineering.
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United Nuclear: The Online Store That Sells You Uranium Ore
United Nuclear is a science supply shop selling uranium ore, aerogel and element samples through a website that has not changed since the early 2000s.
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UseTheKeyboard: Every App's Shortcuts, In One Clean Place
UseTheKeyboard is an open-source directory of keyboard shortcuts for hundreds of apps and websites, laid out plainly with no ads and no listicle preamble.
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Violation Tracker: A Searchable Rap Sheet for Corporations
Violation Tracker collects US corporate fines, settlements and penalties into one free database, aggregated up to the parent company that owns the offender.
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Webkay: Everything Your Browser Tells Every Website You Visit
Webkay shows you, on one page, what any website silently learns the moment you arrive: your location, hardware, network, browser and more. No permissions needed.
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WebSDR: Tune Radio Receivers Around the World From Your Browser
WebSDR lets you listen through real shortwave receivers in other countries, tuning the dial yourself in a browser tab. No hardware, no antenna, no software.
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Whale Follow Mouse: An Orca That Chases Your Cursor Forever
Whale Follow Mouse is a website where a killer whale swims after your mouse pointer. There is nothing else on it, and there does not need to be.
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What Time Is It Right Now: A Domain That Answers Its Own Question
What Time Is It Right Now is a real website named after a fictional one, permanently coming soon, and only barely willing to tell you the time.
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Whichbook: Find a Novel by Mood Instead of Genre
Whichbook lets you pick your next book with sliders for happy/sad, funny/serious, safe/disturbing, plus filters for setting, character and plot shape.
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WikiMapia: The Map Where Anyone Can Label Anything
WikiMapia is a crowd-annotated world map: users draw outlines around places and describe them, producing a layer of local knowledge no official map contains.
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World Births and Deaths: Every Human Arrival and Departure, Live
World Births and Deaths simulates every birth and death on Earth in real time, as a scrolling stream of tiny events. Quietly one of the heaviest pages online.
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World Chat Clock: See The One Hour Everyone Is Actually Awake
World Chat Clock lays several time zones side by side as colored bars so you can spot the overlap where a scattered team can meet without anyone waking at 4am.
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WorldWide Telescope: The Whole Sky, Stitched and Browsable
WorldWide Telescope stitches real sky surveys into one seamless map of the universe you can pan, zoom and switch between wavelengths, free in the browser.
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xkcd 1975: Right Click, the Comic That Is Secretly a Labyrinth
xkcd 1975 looks like a drawing of a context menu. Right-click it and you fall into a nested maze of submenus hiding hundreds of jokes and small toys.
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Your/You're: The Link You Send Instead of Arguing
youryoure.com is one page that settles your versus you're for good, plus twenty more word pairs people get wrong. Built to be linked at someone, silently.
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InviteCount: Beautiful Wedding Websites, Zero Stress
InviteCount pairs modern, designer-quality wedding website themes with seamless RSVP and guest management, simple, premium, and never a subscription.
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The Million Dollar Homepage: 2005, Frozen Forever
The Million Dollar Homepage sold a million pixels at a dollar each in 2005, then froze. A perfect fossil of the early web, still online and still sold out.
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My90sTV: Channel-Surf the 1990s From Your Browser
My90sTV is a simulated 90s television you flip through with a remote, static, glow, and channels of real 1990s clips. Free, and it now lives on MyRetroTVs.
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The Nostalgia Machine: Pick a Year, Hear Your Childhood
The Nostalgia Machine plays the hits from any year between 1951 and today. Pick a year, hit play, and get ambushed by a song you forgot you knew by heart.
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FutureMe: Send an Email to Yourself Years From Now
FutureMe lets you write a letter to your future self and have it delivered in 1, 3, 5 or 10 years. Free, oddly moving, and over 20 million letters deep.
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Bartosz Ciechanowski: The Best Explainers on the Internet
Bartosz Ciechanowski builds interactive, animated deep-dives on how gears, lenses, engines and the Moon actually work. Free, no ads, and quietly astonishing.
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Scratch: Where Millions of Kids Write Their First Code
Scratch is MIT's free block-based coding playground where kids build games, animations, and stories, then share and remix them. No syntax, no cost, no limits.
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SQL Murder Mystery: Learn SQL by Solving a Crime
SQL Murder Mystery drops you in SQL City with a database and a body. Query your way to the killer, free, in-browser, no setup, and genuinely fun.
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BetterExplained: Math That Finally Makes Sense
BetterExplained teaches math with intuition and analogies first, formulas second. Free articles on calculus, imaginary numbers, Bayes, and Fourier transforms.
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Information Is Beautiful: Data You Actually Want to Look At
Information Is Beautiful turns messy data into infographics you want to hang on a wall. Free, browsable by topic, and the source data is published too.
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The Pudding: Visual Essays for Oddly Specific Questions
The Pudding answers questions nobody thought to ask, using real data and gorgeous interactive graphics. Free visual essays that eat your whole afternoon.
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MuscleWiki: Click a Muscle, Get the Right Exercises
MuscleWiki turns an interactive body diagram into an exercise database. Click the muscle you want to train and get demos, form notes and equipment filters.
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How a Car Works: The Free Illustrated Guide to Cars
How a Car Works explains every major car system with clear illustrations and plain language. Free automotive engineering that makes the engine finally click.
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Animated Knots: Every Knot, Tied Step by Step
Animated Knots shows knots as step-by-step animations you can scrub through frame by frame. Free, clear, and genuinely the best knot resource on the internet.
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YouGlish: Hear Any Word Pronounced by Real People
YouGlish plays real YouTube clips of any word or phrase being spoken, in 26 languages and seven English accents. The pronunciation tool that actually works.
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PlayPhrase.me: Any Phrase, Every Movie That Says It
PlayPhrase.me lets you type a phrase and watch every movie clip where someone says it. A supercut machine, a language tool, and an enormous time sink.
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The Wiki Game: Race Through Wikipedia, Link by Link
The Wiki Game drops you on one Wikipedia article and dares you to reach another using only in-article links. Free, fast, and dangerously competitive.
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Board Game Arena: Hundreds of Real Board Games, Free
Board Game Arena lets you play over a thousand licensed board games in your browser, free, against millions of players. Wingspan, Catan, Azul and hundreds more.
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Universal Paperclips: The Clicker That Eats the World
Universal Paperclips starts as one button and ends somewhere you will not see coming. The best clicker game ever made, and a free lesson in AI alignment.
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The Evolution of Trust: Game Theory You Can Play
The Evolution of Trust is a playable explainer that turns the prisoner's dilemma into a game you actually understand. Free, brilliant, 30 minutes well spent.
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Hacker Typer: Mash Keys, Look Like a Movie Hacker
Hacker Typer turns random keyboard mashing into a flood of convincing code. Free, instant, and the fastest way to look extremely busy in front of an audience.
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User Inyerface: The Worst Website, Made on Purpose
User Inyerface is a deliberately awful web form built to teach you what bad UX feels like. One page, infinite rage, and a genuinely useful design lesson.
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wttr.in: The Weather Forecast You Get With curl
wttr.in serves the weather as ASCII art in your browser or straight into your terminal with one curl command. No app, no ads, no cookie banner.
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Worldometers: Watch the World Tick Over in Real Time
Worldometers runs live counters for population, births, deaths, food, energy, water and more. Open it once and you will stare at spinning numbers far too long.
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Freerice: Answer Quiz Questions, Donate Real Rice
Freerice is a free quiz game from the UN World Food Programme where every correct answer funds a donation of rice. Learn words, feed people, feel great.
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TypeLit.io: Learn to Type by Retyping Great Novels
TypeLit.io turns typing practice into reading. Retype Moby Dick, Dracula or Pride and Prejudice line by line and get faster while you finish the classics.
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Monkeytype: The Typing Test People Get Addicted To
Monkeytype is a minimalist, endlessly customizable typing test with clean stats and lovely themes. Free, open source, quietly ruining people's afternoons.
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Kagi Small Web: Personal Blogs, No Algorithm
Kagi Small Web is a live feed of recent posts from independent blogs and personal sites, no ranking, no engagement bait, just humans writing on the open web.
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Wiby: A Search Engine for the Handmade Web
Wiby is a search engine indexing only lightweight, personal, mostly JavaScript-free pages, plus a surprise button that fires you into the old internet.
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Cameron's World: A Collage Built From Dead GeoCities
Cameron's World is a scrolling collage stitched from thousands of salvaged GeoCities pages: spinning GIFs, tiled backgrounds, and the web before it grew up.
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SCP Foundation: The Wiki That Documents Monsters
SCP Foundation is a collaborative fiction wiki where thousands of writers document impossible objects in cold clinical prose. Free, endless, unnerving.
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Library of Babel: Every Book That Could Ever Be Written
The Library of Babel contains every possible page of text, including this sentence and your obituary. A working version of Borges' infinite library.
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This Person Does Not Exist: Infinite Faces, Zero Humans
This Person Does Not Exist shows a photorealistic face of someone who never existed. Refresh for another. A no-button site that rewired the whole internet.
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Artvee: Thousands of Free Public Domain Artworks to Print
Artvee is a free archive of high-resolution public domain paintings, posters and illustrations you can download, print and hang. No licensing headache.
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Piskel: Free Online Pixel Art and Sprite Animation
Piskel is a free browser sprite editor for animated pixel art, layers, onion skinning, live preview and one-click GIF or spritesheet export. No account needed.
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JS Paint: Classic MS Paint, Rebuilt for Your Browser
JS Paint is a pixel-faithful remake of classic MS Paint that runs in any browser: same tools, same palette, plus dark mode, offline use and multiplayer.
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Weave Silk: Draw Symmetrical Art You Can't Get Wrong
Weave Silk turns any mouse drag into glowing symmetrical generative art. No skill required, no signup, and your first attempt will already look framed-worthy.
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WebGL Fluid Simulation: Swirl Color With Your Cursor
WebGL Fluid Simulation turns your browser into a pool of glowing liquid color. Drag to swirl it, tweak the physics, grab a screenshot. Free and hypnotic.
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Orb Farm: Grow a Tiny Sealed World in Your Browser
Orb Farm lets you build a sealed aquatic ecosystem from sand, water, algae and fish, then watch it balance itself. A free browser terrarium that keeps growing.
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The Powder Toy: A Physics Sandbox With No Guardrails
The Powder Toy is a free physics sandbox with heat, pressure, gravity and working electronics. Build a nuclear reactor, then melt it. Open source and free.
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Quick, Draw!: Can a Neural Net Read Your Doodles?
Quick, Draw! gives you 20 seconds to sketch a prompt while a neural network guesses out loud. Six rounds, no skill needed. Free, and impossible to play once.
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Sandspiel: The Falling-Sand Simulator You Can't Put Down
Sandspiel is a free browser falling-sand simulator where sand, water, fire and plants fight it out in real time, then you post the result to a public gallery.
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Blitzortung: Watch Lightning Strike the Planet Live
The Blitzortung Lightning Map shows strikes worldwide seconds after they happen, built by a volunteer detector network. Turn the sound on. Free and hypnotic.
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OCEARCH Shark Tracker: Follow Real Sharks by Name
The OCEARCH Shark Tracker maps tagged sharks in near real time, each one named, with a profile. Watch a great white cross an ocean. Free and weirdly personal.
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Explore.org Live Cams: Bears, Reefs and Puppies, 24/7
Explore.org Live Cams streams hundreds of free nature cameras around the clock, from bear rivers to coral reefs and puppy rooms. Warning: nothing gets done.
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Bruno Simon: The Portfolio You Drive Around In
Bruno Simon's portfolio is a 3D world where you steer a tiny car through his work, smashing bricks on the way. The most-copied personal site on the web. Free.
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If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel: Scroll the Solar System
If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel is a true-to-scale map of the solar system you scroll through. Space is mostly nothing, and this proves it. Free and brilliant.
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Scale of the Universe: One Scrollbar, Everything
Scale of the Universe zooms you from quantum foam to the observable universe on a single slider. Click anything to learn what it is. Free, and overwhelming.
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Hoodmaps: The Rude, Honest Map of Every City
Hoodmaps is a crowdsourced city map where locals label each neighborhood with what people actually call it. Hipsters, suits, tourists. Free, funny, brutal.
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OldMapsOnline: Every Old Map of Your Town, in One Search
OldMapsOnline searches centuries of historical maps from libraries worldwide by place and year. See your street as it looked in 1780. Free and dangerously fun.
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Native Land: Whose Territory Are You Standing On?
Native Land maps Indigenous territories, treaties and languages worldwide. Type your address and see the nations whose land you live on. Free, and humbling.
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The True Size Of: See How Badly Maps Lie to You
The True Size Of lets you drag countries around a world map to compare them properly. Greenland is not the size of Africa, and you can prove it in ten seconds.
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Random Street View: Teleport Anywhere on Earth
Random Street View drops you at a genuinely random spot on the planet via Google Street View. Hit next, look around, repeat. Free, instant, dangerously moreish.
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Squoosh: Shrink Images Without Wrecking Them
Squoosh compresses images in your browser with a live side-by-side quality slider. Nothing uploads, nothing installs, and your files get dramatically smaller.
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Pink Trombone: Play a Human Throat With Your Mouse
Pink Trombone is an interactive human vocal tract you can pinch and stretch. Drag the tongue, shape vowels, make it talk. Free, strange, oddly educational.
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Patatap: Turn Your Keyboard Into a Sound Machine
Patatap turns every key from A to Z into a sound and a burst of animation. Hit space to change the whole palette. Free, instant, impossible to use just once.
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Chrome Music Lab: Learn Music by Playing With It
Chrome Music Lab turns music theory into hands-on browser toys, draw sound, build rhythms, see a spectrogram, make a song. Free, no account, any device.
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Forgotify: Hear Songs Nobody Has Ever Played
Forgotify digs Spotify tracks nobody has ever played to completion out of the dark and hands you one. You might be the first human ever to hear it. Free to try.
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Musicmap: The Family Tree of Every Music Genre
Musicmap charts the genealogy of popular music, hundreds of genres, grouped into super-genres and wired together by influence, with audio examples for each.
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Poolside FM: Endless Summer in a Retro Mac Window
Poolside FM is a 24/7 summer radio station wrapped in a retro Mac desktop, complete with VHS holiday footage. Swimwear optional, permanent vacation included.
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A Soft Murmur: Mix Your Own Rain, Fire and Waves
A Soft Murmur lets you blend rain, thunder, waves, fire and coffee-shop chatter into one custom ambient soundscape. Free in the browser, saved mixes included.
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Radiooooo: A Time Machine for the World's Music
Radiooooo lets you pick a country and a decade on a world map and hear what people there were really listening to. A crowd-built time machine, free to try.
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Drive & Listen: Cruise 100+ Cities With Local Radio
Drive & Listen puts you in a car rolling through 100+ real cities with the local radio on. Free, instant, and the calmest travel you can do from a desk chair.
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A Good Movie to Watch: Curated Picks, Zero Scrolling
A Good Movie to Watch is a hand-picked film site with no algorithm. Filter by mood, genre and streaming service, get a spoiler-free pitch, and start watching.
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camelcamelcamel: See Any Amazon Price Before You Buy
camelcamelcamel charts the full price history of any Amazon product, so you can tell a real deal from a fake one. Free price drop alerts, no signup needed.
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JustWatch: Find Where Any Movie Is Streaming Tonight
JustWatch searches every streaming service in your country at once and tells you where a film is free, included, rented or bought. Free, fast, no guessing.
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Supercook: Recipes From What's Already in Your Fridge
Supercook asks what you actually have, then finds recipes you can cook right now with nothing extra. Free, no signup, and brilliant at killing food waste.
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PairDrop: AirDrop for Every Device, Right in a Tab
PairDrop sends files and text between any two devices through the browser. No app, no signup, no cable. Open-source, free, works phone to laptop to TV.
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RhymeZone: The Fastest Rhyme and Word Finder Online
RhymeZone finds rhymes, near rhymes, synonyms, antonyms, homophones and descriptive words in one instant lookup. Free, no signup, and startlingly fast.
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Hemingway Editor: Make Your Writing Bold and Clear
Hemingway Editor highlights your long sentences, passive voice and adverbs in color, then hands you a readability grade. Paste text, edit, done. Free online.
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regex101: The Regex Tester That Explains Your Pattern
regex101 is a free online regex tester that explains every token as you type, supports PCRE, JavaScript, Python, Java, Go and Rust, and generates code.
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Omni Calculator: 3,900 Calculators for Everything
Omni Calculator has nearly 4,000 free calculators covering finance, physics, health, construction and everyday math, each one explained, not just answered.
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AutoDraw: Google's AI Fixes Your Terrible Drawings
AutoDraw guesses what your scribble was supposed to be and swaps it for a clean illustration by a real artist. Free, browser-based, and absurdly satisfying.
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Unsplash: Free High-Res Photos, No Strings
Unsplash gives you high-resolution photographs free for commercial and personal use, with no attribution required, a huge library and no stock-photo cheese.
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Coolors: Build a Color Palette With the Spacebar
Coolors generates color palettes instantly, hit the spacebar, lock the shades you love, reroll the rest, then export to CSS, SVG, PDF, ASE or Tailwind.
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Excalidraw: The Whiteboard That Looks Hand-Drawn
Excalidraw is a free, open-source virtual whiteboard with a sketchy hand-drawn style, live collaboration, end-to-end encryption and no account required.
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remove.bg: Delete Any Photo Background in Seconds
remove.bg cuts the background out of any photo automatically in seconds, hair, fur, tricky edges and all, with no selection tools and no design skills.
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CloudConvert: Turn Any File Into Any Other File
CloudConvert converts between 200+ formats, documents, images, video, audio, ebooks, archives, fonts and CAD, right in your browser with nothing to install.
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iLovePDF: Every PDF Fix in One Free Place
iLovePDF merges, splits, compresses, converts, signs and unlocks PDFs in your browser for free, with no account needed and a tool for every PDF disaster.
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Ninite: Install All Your Apps in One Click
Ninite lets you tick the Windows apps you want and builds a single installer that sets them all up silently, with no toolbars, no next-next-next, no junk.
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Cover Your Tracks: See How Trackable Your Browser Is
Cover Your Tracks is the EFF's free test that shows how unique your browser fingerprint is and whether your ad blocker is actually stopping trackers. One click.
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JustDeleteMe: Delete Any Account, Fast
JustDeleteMe is a free directory of direct account-deletion links for hundreds of web services, each rated easy, medium, hard or flat-out impossible.
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Have I Been Pwned: Check If Your Email Was Breached
Have I Been Pwned tells you whether your email or password turned up in a known data breach, free, ad-free, and run by a respected security researcher.
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Atlas Obscura: A Map of the World's Strangest Places
Atlas Obscura is a crowd-built guide to hidden wonders, bone chapels, abandoned rockets, weird foods and secret gardens, mapped, searchable and free to browse.
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earth :: nullschool: A Living Globe of Wind and Water
earth :: nullschool renders live global wind, ocean currents and air quality as a spinning, hypnotic 3D globe you can drag, zoom and lose an hour to. Free.
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MarineTraffic: Track the World's Ships in Real Time
MarineTraffic maps live cargo ships, tankers and ferries worldwide, routes, ports, cargo types and arrival estimates. Global trade, visible on one screen.
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Flightradar24: Watch Every Plane in the Sky, Live
Flightradar24 shows nearly every aircraft currently flying on one live map, routes, altitude, aircraft type and where that plane over your house is going.
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Wolfram Alpha: Ask a Question, Get an Actual Answer
Wolfram Alpha computes answers instead of listing links, math, science, units, dates, nutrition and data, all worked out from curated knowledge. Free to use.
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Windy: The Weather Map That Actually Looks Like Weather
Windy is an animated weather map showing live wind, rain, temperature, waves and storms as flowing lines you can watch move across the planet. Free, no account.
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Our World in Data: Free Charts on How Life Is Changing
Our World in Data turns global research on health, energy, climate and poverty into free, sourced, downloadable charts, plus writing that explains them.
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Open Library: Borrow Millions of Books Free in Browser
Open Library is the Internet Archive's free lending library, a page for every book ever published, plus millions you can borrow and read in your browser.
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Project Gutenberg: 75,000 Free Ebooks, No Account Needed
Project Gutenberg hosts 75,000+ public-domain ebooks you can download instantly in EPUB, Kindle, HTML or plain text. No sign-up, no DRM, no cost.
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Khan Academy: A Free World-Class Education, Genuinely
Khan Academy offers free structured courses in math, science, economics and test prep, from counting to calculus. No ads, no catch, it's a nonprofit.
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Internet Archive: The Wayback Machine and So Much More
The Internet Archive stores hundreds of billions of archived web pages, plus free books, films and software. The Wayback Machine is only the front door.
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Neal.fun: The Best Toy Box on the Internet
Neal.fun is Neal Agarwal's collection of interactive toys, The Password Game, Asteroid Launcher, The Deep Sea and dozens more. All free, all excellent.
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Zoomquilt: A Painting That Zooms Into Itself Forever
Zoomquilt is an infinitely zooming painting that loops seamlessly into itself. No end, no point, just an endless descent you steer with your scroll wheel.
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Every Noise at Once: A Map of Every Music Genre
Every Noise at Once plots thousands of music genres on one giant scatterplot. Find drift phonk, throat singing and stomp and holler, then go exploring.
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The Useless Web: One Button to Anywhere Pointless
The Useless Web is a single button that flings you to a completely pointless website. No feed, no algorithm, no purpose. Press it and find out where you land.
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Photopea: Free Photoshop That Runs in Your Browser
Photopea is a full-featured image editor that opens PSD files right in a browser tab. Layers, masks, smart objects, RAW support, no install, no account.
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Radio Garden: Spin the Globe, Hear the World Live
Radio Garden puts thousands of live local radio stations on a 3D globe. Drag the planet, drop a pin on Reykjavik, and hear what's playing there right now.
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Window Swap: Look Out of a Stranger's Window
Window Swap shows you the view from a real person's window somewhere else on Earth. One button, ten minutes of someone else's morning, zero small talk required.