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Moyu Paradise · 100 sites to kill time at work

Open 100 hand-checked sites — from trending feeds and browser games to decoy screens and rain sounds. Slacking off, organised.

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✨Editor's Picks

Tried them myself, none of them are duds

🎮 Browser Games 18

NEW

Coolmath Games

coolmathgames.com

Hundreds of browser games, no download needed

Open site ↗

Krunker

krunker.io

Fast browser FPS that loads in seconds

Open site ↗

Slither.io

slither.io

Snake battle royale, two minutes a round

Open site ↗
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Agar.io

agar.io

Eat smaller blobs, grow, don't get eaten

Open site ↗

Wordle

nytimes.com

One five-letter word a day, worldwide

Open site ↗

GeoGuessr

geoguessr.com

Guess where in the world the street view is

Open site ↗

Skribbl.io

skribbl.io

Draw and guess with friends or strangers

Open site ↗

Little Alchemy 2

littlealchemy2.com

Combine elements and discover over 700 things

Open site ↗

2048

play2048.co

Slide tiles, merge numbers, chase the next power

Open site ↗

Chess.com

chess.com

Play chess online, with puzzles and lessons

Open site ↗

Lichess

lichess.org

Free open-source chess, no ads, no paywall

Open site ↗

Shell Shockers

shellshock.io

Egg-themed browser FPS, runs in a tab

Open site ↗

Squaredle

squaredle.app

A daily word-search puzzle on a grid

Open site ↗

Diep.io

diep.io

Drive a tank, upgrade it, shoot everything

Open site ↗

Zombs Royale

zombsroyale.io

2D battle royale with five-minute matches

Open site ↗

Sudoku.com

sudoku.com

Sudoku with difficulty levels and a clean board

Open site ↗

Gartic Phone

garticphone.com

Telephone game played with drawings

Open site ↗

Monkeytype

monkeytype.com

Minimal typing test, quietly addictive

Open site ↗

🤯 Weird Internet 18

NEW

The Useless Web

theuselessweb.com

Throws you at a random pointless website

Open site ↗

Bored Button

boredbutton.com

Hit the button, land somewhere entertaining

Open site ↗

Pointer Pointer

pointerpointer.com

Photos of people pointing at wherever your cursor is

Open site ↗
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Neal.fun

neal.fun

Interactive experiments and beautiful time sinks

Open site ↗

Windows 93

windows93.net

A fake operating system stuffed with secrets

Open site ↗

Zoomquilt

zoomquilt.org

An illustration you can zoom into forever

Open site ↗

Staggering Beauty

staggeringbeauty.com

Shake the cursor and watch it go berserk

Open site ↗

Cat Bounce

cat-bounce.com

Bounce a screenful of cats around

Open site ↗

Endless Horse

endless.horse

A horse with no bottom in sight

Open site ↗

This Is Sand

thisissand.com

Pour coloured sand and make something

Open site ↗

Wait But Why

waitbutwhy.com

Long illustrated essays about big questions

Open site ↗

Is It Christmas?

isitchristmas.com

Answers exactly one question, correctly

Open site ↗

Wiby

wiby.me

A search engine for the old, hand-made web

Open site ↗

The Nicest Place

thenicestplace.net

Strangers waving at the camera, on loop

Open site ↗

Window Swap

window-swap.com

Look out of a stranger's window somewhere else

Open site ↗

Line Rider

linerider.com

Draw a track and send a sled down it

Open site ↗

Weavesilk

weavesilk.com

Symmetrical light painting with your mouse

Open site ↗

Patatap

patatap.com

Your keyboard becomes a noise-making instrument

Open site ↗

🎭 Look Busy 8

NEW

Fake Update

fakeupdate.net

Full-screen fake system update screens

Open site ↗

Hacker Typer

hackertyper.net

Mash keys, screens fill with code

Open site ↗

Keybr

keybr.com

Typing trainer that looks like real training

Open site ↗
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Hemingway Editor

hemingwayapp.com

Highlights hard-to-read sentences in your writing

Open site ↗

ZenPen

zenpen.io

Distraction-free writing, plain white and black

Open site ↗

Online Notepad

onlinenotepad.org

A plain page of text, nothing else

Open site ↗

Virtual Piano

virtualpiano.net

Play piano from your keyboard

Open site ↗

Grammarly

grammarly.com

Grammar and tone checking as you write

Open site ↗

🛠️ Actual Tools 16

TinyPNG

tinypng.com

Shrink PNG and JPEG files without visible loss

Open site ↗

remove.bg

remove.bg

Cut the background out of any photo in one click

Open site ↗

Squoosh

squoosh.app

Compress images with a live before-and-after view

Open site ↗
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Photopea

photopea.com

Photoshop in a browser tab, opens PSD files

Open site ↗

Excalidraw

excalidraw.com

Hand-drawn style whiteboard for diagrams

Open site ↗

WeTransfer

wetransfer.com

Send large files without an account

Open site ↗

iLovePDF

ilovepdf.com

Merge, split, compress and convert PDFs

Open site ↗

CloudConvert

cloudconvert.com

Convert between almost any file format

Open site ↗

Regex101

regex101.com

Build and debug regular expressions with explanations

Open site ↗

Ray.so

ray.so

Code screenshots with a cleaner modern look

Open site ↗

Coolors

coolors.co

Generate colour palettes by pressing space

Open site ↗

Unsplash

unsplash.com

Free high-resolution photos, no attribution needed

Open site ↗

Temp Mail

temp-mail.org

Disposable email address, no sign-up

Open site ↗

tldraw

tldraw.com

Instant infinite whiteboard, no sign-up

Open site ↗

🎬 Watch & Listen 11

YouTube

youtube.com

Everything from long documentaries to ten-second clips

Open site ↗

Twitch

twitch.tv

Live streaming, good as background company

Open site ↗

Spotify Web Player

open.spotify.com

The full Spotify library in a browser tab

Open site ↗
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SoundCloud

soundcloud.com

Where independent musicians upload first

Open site ↗

Bandcamp

bandcamp.com

Independent music you can stream in full

Open site ↗

Internet Archive

archive.org

Old films, music, software and web pages

Open site ↗

Tubi

tubitv.com

Free films and TV, funded by advertising

Open site ↗

Pluto TV

pluto.tv

Free live TV channels that just keep playing

Open site ↗

Radio Garden

radio.garden

Spin a globe and tune into any country's radio

Open site ↗

NTS Radio

nts.live

London radio station with excellent curation

Open site ↗

Letterboxd

letterboxd.com

Track films you've watched, read good short reviews

Open site ↗

🎵 Calm Down 9

NEW

Rainy Mood

rainymood.com

Looping rain, the classic focus sound

Open site ↗

A Soft Murmur

asoftmurmur.com

Mix rain, thunder, wind and café noise

Open site ↗

Noisli

noisli.com

Background noise generator with a built-in timer

Open site ↗
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MyNoise

mynoise.net

Professional-grade noise generators you can tune

Open site ↗

Lofi Cafe

lofi.cafe

Lo-fi radio with a lovely interface

Open site ↗

Chillhop

chillhop.com

Official Chillhop radio, live around the clock

Open site ↗

Music for Programming

musicforprogramming.net

Mixes built specifically for deep work

Open site ↗

Poolsuite FM

poolsuite.net

Retro summer radio with a 1980s holiday vibe

Open site ↗

Explore.org

explore.org

Live cameras on animals around the world

Open site ↗

📚 Learn Something 10

Wikipedia

wikipedia.org

The encyclopedia that eats entire afternoons

Open site ↗

Khan Academy

khanacademy.org

Free structured courses from arithmetic to calculus

Open site ↗

Coursera

coursera.org

University courses you can sit in on for free

Open site ↗
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edX

edx.org

Academic courses from MIT, Harvard and others

Open site ↗

Brilliant

brilliant.org

Learn maths and science by solving problems

Open site ↗

MIT OpenCourseWare

ocw.mit.edu

MIT course materials, free and permanent

Open site ↗

Duolingo

duolingo.com

Learn a language in ten-minute daily sessions

Open site ↗

Wolfram Alpha

wolframalpha.com

A computation engine, not a search engine

Open site ↗

Our World in Data

ourworldindata.org

Global problems explained through charts

Open site ↗

Atlas Obscura

atlasobscura.com

A map of the world's strangest places

Open site ↗
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📖Site Guide · every entry explained

Each site below gets a paragraph: what it actually is, the moment it's the right thing to open, and the catch worth knowing first. Reading this is faster than opening them one by one.

🎮 Browser Games 18

Two-minute rounds that run in a tab

  • Coolmath Games coolmathgames.com

    Coolmath Games has been the office and classroom time sink since the Flash era and it still holds up: hundreds of games that open instantly with no account and no download. The library skews toward puzzle and skill games, which is exactly what you want on a short break. The catch is the ad load — this site is monetised aggressively, so an ad blocker makes a real difference. If you want modern graphics or online matchmaking, look elsewhere; this is deliberately simple stuff.

  • Krunker krunker.io

    A browser first-person shooter that loads fast enough to be worth opening on a whim. Matches are short, movement is quick, and there is a proper ranked scene if you get hooked. Runs surprisingly well on a work laptop, though you will want to turn the graphics down on integrated chips. The one thing to know: the skill ceiling is high and the lobby is full of people who have been playing for years, so expect to be bad at it for a while.

  • Slither.io slither.io

    The premise takes five seconds to learn: steer a worm, eat glowing dots, grow, and do not run into anyone. Rounds last anywhere from thirty seconds to ten minutes, which is what makes it such a good break game — you can always stop after this one. The difficulty curve is brutal once you get long, because a bigger snake turns slowly and everyone is hunting you. No account, no tutorial, works on a trackpad.

  • Agar.io agar.io

    The original cell-eating battle royale and still the cleanest version of the idea. You start as a tiny circle, absorb anything smaller than you, and try to survive long enough to matter. Matches are fast and the whole thing is mouse-only, which makes it unusually discreet. Downsides: the leaderboard is dominated by players who team up, which can feel unfair in solo play, and the site runs a fair number of ads around the game canvas.

  • Wordle nytimes.com

    One puzzle per day, six guesses, and then you are locked out until tomorrow — which is precisely why it became a daily ritual for millions of people. Because everybody gets the same word, the conversation afterwards is half the point. The enforced scarcity is the feature: there is no way to binge it, so it can never eat your afternoon. Be aware the New York Times version now sits behind their account wall for stats history, and it needs a working connection to their servers.

  • GeoGuessr geoguessr.com

    You get dropped into a random Street View location and have to work out where on Earth you are from the sun, the signage, the road markings and the car's roof rack. Genuinely educational in a way that does not feel like education. The free tier only gives you a handful of rounds per day, which is either a frustration or a built-in limit depending on your priorities. Best played with other people in the room — the arguing is the fun part.

  • Skribbl.io skribbl.io

    Online Pictionary with a private-room option, which is what makes it useful: create a room, send the link to colleagues, and you have a genuinely good team activity that needs no installs. Drawing with a mouse is deliberately clumsy, and the guessing is timed, so rounds move briskly. Public lobbies can be chaotic and occasionally rude, so use a private room if you are playing with people you know.

  • Little Alchemy 2 littlealchemy2.com

    Start with four basic elements and combine them to discover hundreds more — fire plus water makes steam, steam plus earth makes a geyser, and so on up the chain. It is a quietly excellent way to spend twenty minutes because progress is visible and there is always one more combination to try. The full list runs past seven hundred items, so it scales from a coffee break to a long evening. Works offline in the browser once loaded, which is handy on a flaky connection.

  • 2048 play2048.co

    The archetypal one-more-go game: slide tiles on a four-by-four grid, merge matching numbers, and try to reach 2048 without filling the board. It runs on arrow keys, needs no mouse precision, and looks like nothing at all from three desks away, which makes it the most discreet game on this list. The catch is that it is genuinely hard to stop — ten minutes is easy to lose. There is nothing to install and nothing to sign up for.

  • Chess.com chess.com

    The biggest chess site on the internet: rapid games against anyone in the world, a daily puzzle, and an enormous library of opening lessons. The reason it works as a work-break site is that a five-minute blitz game has a natural end — unlike social media, there is no infinite scroll. Free accounts get a limited number of daily puzzles and no deep game analysis; the paid tier is what unlocks the study tools. Time controls start at one minute, so be careful which button you press.

  • Lichess lichess.org

    Everything chess.com does, run as a non-profit and funded by donations, which means no ads and no premium upsell anywhere on the site. The interface is plainer but faster, and the analysis board is completely free, which is unusual. If you want to play a few games without being advertised at, this is the one to bookmark. The pool of players is a little smaller than the big commercial site, so matchmaking at odd hours or exotic time controls can take longer.

  • Shell Shockers shellshock.io

    You are an egg with a gun. That is the whole pitch, and it works better than it has any right to: fast rounds, several weapons, and a surprisingly active player base for something that runs in a browser tab with no download. Good for a quick competitive fix. The art style is cartoonish enough that a passing glance reads as a harmless animation rather than a shooter, which is either convenient or a genuine concern depending on your workplace.

  • Squaredle squaredle.app

    Find every word hidden in a grid of letters, with a fresh puzzle each day and a harder weekend edition. It scratches the same itch as a crossword but is easier to pick up and put down, and like the best daily puzzles it is finite — there is a defined end, which protects your afternoon. A hint system exists for when you are one word short and about to give up. Works fine on a phone, so it is a good commute option too.

  • Diep.io diep.io

    The concept is a tank that grows: destroy shapes and other players, spend points on upgrades, and pick a class branch that changes how you play. There are enough build combinations to make it interesting for a lot longer than the simple graphics suggest. Rounds are quick and there is no sign-up. It is more mechanically demanding than the other io games here, so it is less forgiving if you have only got one hand free.

  • Zombs Royale zombsroyale.io

    A top-down battle royale that condenses the whole hundred-player formula into a match you can finish before your coffee gets cold. Loot, shrink zone, last one standing — all the beats are there, just at ten times the speed. It is genuinely good at the thing it is trying to do. On the downside the player base is smaller than it once was, so some lobbies will be filled with bots, which is either great for your win rate or a bit hollow.

  • Sudoku.com sudoku.com

    A straightforward, well-built sudoku site with six difficulty levels and a clean board that does not try to sell you anything on top. The beginner and easy tiers are genuinely quick, and the expert tier will eat a lunch break on its own. There are number-pad controls and a pencil-mark mode for candidates, which is what you need once puzzles get hard. The strongest point for an office setting is that a sudoku grid is the least suspicious thing anyone can be looking at.

  • Gartic Phone garticphone.com

    The telephone game, but each person draws what they were told and then describes what they were shown, producing a slideshow of escalating nonsense by the end. Needs at least three or four people to work, and it is by far the best of the multiplayer drawing games if you can get a group together. Private rooms are free and there is no download. Result images are shareable, which is half the payoff.

  • Monkeytype monkeytype.com

    A typing speed test with a stripped-back interface and a serious amount of customisation hidden underneath — you can choose word lists, languages, punctuation, code snippets, even quote sources. It tracks your words per minute and accuracy over time and shows where your weak keys are. Upgrading your typing is a legitimately useful way to spend ten minutes, which makes it one of the few things on this list you could mention to your manager without lying.

🤯 Weird Internet 18

The strange corners worth a look

  • The Useless Web theuselessweb.com

    One button, and it takes you to a random website that has no reason to exist — a screaming goat, a page that just plays a single noise, a site that does one inexplicable thing very well. It is the original of this genre and still the best introduction to it. Ideal for the moment when you want to look at something absurd for ninety seconds and then get back to work. Some destinations are loud, so check your volume first.

  • Bored Button boredbutton.com

    Curated rather than random: every press sends you to a small interactive toy, game or oddity that has been vetted for being worth the stop. That makes the hit rate noticeably higher than the pure-random equivalents, and you can go several presses deep without hitting a dud. There is a proper 404-like dead-end from time to time. Good for when you want to be shown something rather than to choose it.

  • Pointer Pointer pointerpointer.com

    Move your mouse anywhere on the page and it finds a photograph of somebody pointing at that exact spot. That is all it does, and the technical trick behind it is more interesting than the result — a database of photos indexed by where in the frame the pointing hand is. Best described in one sentence to a colleague, who will then inevitably try it themselves. Harmless, silent, and completely safe to open at work.

  • Neal.fun neal.fun

    A collection of self-contained interactive toys, each one built around a single clever idea: scale yourself against the size of the universe, scroll down through the deep sea by depth, try to draw a perfect circle, or see how far you can make it through a password game with increasingly absurd rules. The quality is consistently high and each piece has a defined end, so it does not turn into an infinite scroll. This is the one to open when you want something genuinely well made.

  • Windows 93 windows93.net

    An entire fictional operating system rendered in the browser, complete with a working file explorer, a music player, games, and a long tail of jokes hidden behind almost every icon. Half the fun is clicking things to find out whether they do anything. It is a genuinely impressive piece of web art that happens to look completely innocuous from a distance. Modern browsers handle it fine, but it needs sound enabled to get the full effect, so be careful with speakers.

  • Zoomquilt zoomquilt.org

    A collaborative painting that loops seamlessly into itself — the image is always zooming in, and the detail never runs out because the artwork wraps around. The effect is hypnotic and slightly unsettling, which is exactly the point. It runs by itself with no interaction, so it works well as moving background art on a second monitor. If you are prone to motion sickness from visual loops, this one may not be for you.

  • Staggering Beauty staggeringbeauty.com

    A hairy worm follows your cursor, and if you shake it enough the whole thing explodes into flashing colour and a noise that is much louder than you expect. The site is a single joke, but it is a well-timed one, and the warning about the sound is not a formality. Do not open this one with the volume up in an open-plan office. It is also a piece of early web-art history, which is a decent excuse for having it bookmarked.

  • Cat Bounce cat-bounce.com

    Click to spawn a cat, watch it fall, bounce, and eventually drift off the bottom of the screen. You can add as many as your machine will tolerate, at which point the whole thing becomes an absurd physics demonstration. There is no score, no goal and no end, which on a bad day is exactly the right amount of pressure. Completely silent by default, so it is safe to leave open.

  • Endless Horse endless.horse

    An ASCII horse that simply does not end — the legs keep going, no matter how far you scroll. The joke lands immediately and there is nothing else to do here, which somehow makes it better: it is a statement about the internet itself. Takes two seconds to load and costs you thirty seconds of attention. A useful thing to send to someone who has just asked you to look at something pointless.

  • This Is Sand thisissand.com

    Click and hold to pour sand, let gravity settle it, and build up coloured layers into something that looks surprisingly deliberate. There is a full colour picker and the results are genuinely attractive, which makes it a better creative break than it sounds. Works well on a tablet. No account and no saving by default — if you make something you like, screenshot it before you close the tab, because it will be gone.

  • Wait But Why waitbutwhy.com

    Deep, carefully argued essays with stick-figure illustrations, covering everything from why procrastination works the way it does to what happens when artificial intelligence arrives. The pieces are long by design — an hour is a normal length, which makes them a poor fit for a five-minute break but excellent company over lunch. The writing is unusually clear about its own uncertainty, which is rarer than it should be.

  • Is It Christmas? isitchristmas.com

    A single page that answers one yes-or-no question, and gets it right. For 364 days a year the answer is no. There is nothing else here at all, which is precisely the joke, and there is a certain satisfaction in a website that has been quietly maintained for over a decade to do nothing but tell the truth once a year. Loads instantly, works on any device.

  • Wiby wiby.me

    Wiby deliberately indexes the un-commercial corner of the web: personal homepages, hobby sites, text pages, things built in the late nineties by one person on a static HTML file. Searching it feels like the internet did before everything got optimised, and the surprise-me button reliably lands somewhere you would never find otherwise. Nothing about it is slick, and that is the point. Excellent for a genuinely unexpected five minutes.

  • The Nicest Place thenicestplace.net

    A rotating gallery of short clips of people smiling and waving directly at the camera. No music, no captions, no framing — just ordinary people being friendly. It is the single most effective antidote to a bad afternoon on this entire list, and it takes about forty seconds. Silent by default so it is safe to leave open, though you will probably want the sound off anyway.

  • Window Swap window-swap.com

    People around the world upload short clips of the view from their window, and you get served one at random — a rainy street in Seoul, a balcony in Lisbon, a garden in Vermont. It is a genuinely lovely use of the internet and a much more restful form of travel than a feed. Video quality varies a lot depending on who uploaded it, and the site depends on people continuing to contribute, so it can go quiet.

  • Line Rider linerider.com

    Freehand draw a line, drop a sled at the top, and watch physics take over — which is fun for thirty seconds and then, if the bug bites, genuinely absorbing for entire evenings. The community has produced tracks that are closer to engineering than play, and the editor has enough tools to get you there. The original Flash version is also archived, though the modern build is the one to use. Quiet, no account, saves locally.

  • Weavesilk weavesilk.com

    Whatever you drag, it mirrors into a symmetrical glowing form, and the results look considerably more artistic than the effort involved. You can change the symmetry axis and colour palette, and turn on a colour cycle that makes everything move. It is the best of the drawing toys for people who cannot draw, because the symmetry does the hard work. Results are not saved, so screenshot anything you want to keep.

  • Patatap patatap.com

    Every letter key triggers a shape and a sound, and holding down a rhythm in the right order can sound genuinely musical. There are several sound packs to switch between, so the initial novelty lasts longer than you would expect. It is a better break activity than it looks, mostly because your hands are already on the keyboard. Turn the volume down before you start experimenting.

🎭 Look Busy 8

Screens that pass as work

  • Fake Update fakeupdate.net

    Full-screen, pixel-accurate fake update screens for Windows, macOS, and a selection of genuinely alarming variants including the classic blue screen. Press F11 for full screen, and from any distance your machine looks like it is doing something important and unavoidable. This is the most effective single decoy on the internet and it has been for years. Obviously, do not leave it up when you actually need your computer.

  • Hacker Typer hackertyper.net

    Press any key and convincing-looking source code streams out at impossible speed, complete with the occasional dramatic access-granted popup. Nobody who knows anything about programming will be fooled for more than a second, but from across a room it reads as intense technical work. There are several themes, including a proper terminal look. The sound effects are off by default, which is the correct decision.

  • Keybr keybr.com

    A typing tutor that adapts to your weak letters, generating nonsense words built from the keys you keep getting wrong. It looks and behaves like a professional training tool, which means nobody questions you spending twenty minutes on it — and it genuinely does make you faster. The statistics page tracks your progress by key, which is oddly satisfying to watch improve. Free, no account needed, works offline once loaded.

  • Hemingway Editor hemingwayapp.com

    Paste in a paragraph and it flags the sentences that are too long, the passive voice, the adverbs and the phrases that could be cut. The interface is clean and the feedback is immediate, which makes the whole thing feel like careful editing even when you are mostly watching colours appear. Genuinely useful for writing anything a human will read. The free version does everything in a single pass; the paid tier adds saving and export.

  • ZenPen zenpen.io

    A full-screen text editor with no toolbar, no sidebar and no notifications — just white space and a cursor. That minimalism is also what makes it a perfect background: from a distance it is indistinguishable from any document you might plausibly be working on. Basic formatting exists but is hidden until you ask for it. Text is not saved anywhere, so copy it out before closing the tab.

  • Online Notepad onlinenotepad.org

    A web notepad with no features to speak of, which is exactly the point. White background, black text, no logos shouting for attention, no auto-saving to somewhere you do not control. If you want the least suspicious possible thing to have open on screen while you think, this is it. Content stays in the browser tab only — closing it loses everything, so paste anything worth keeping into a real document first.

  • Virtual Piano virtualpiano.net

    Maps your keyboard to a full piano keyboard, so pressing letters plays notes. There is a large library of sheet music transcribed into letter sequences, including a lot of pop and film themes, so you can learn an actual recognisable tune in a few minutes rather than just making noise. The sample quality is decent for a free browser instrument. Keep the volume low — a piano solo is not subtle in an open-plan office.

  • Grammarly grammarly.com

    A writing assistant that checks grammar, clarity, tone and wordiness, either as an editor you paste into or as a browser extension. The reason it belongs in this category is that spending fifteen minutes polishing an email looks, from any angle, like taking work seriously — and it is arguably true. The free tier covers correctness well; suggestions about tone and delivery are behind the subscription. Sign-up required for the web editor.

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🛠️ Actual Tools 16

Get something done while you're here

  • TinyPNG tinypng.com

    Drag in an image, get it back substantially smaller with no visible difference. The compression is smart enough that a screenshot or photograph usually drops by half or more, and you can process up to twenty files at once for free. This is the single most useful utility on this site for anyone who has ever had to email a screenshot. It keeps the transparency in PNGs, which a lot of compressors do not.

  • remove.bg remove.bg

    Upload a photo and the subject is separated from the background automatically, with no manual masking at all. It handles hair and soft edges far better than the crude tools most people have used, and it takes about five seconds. Free downloads are at lower resolution, which is fine for a slide deck and not fine for print. If you want a similar job done by hand with full control, Photopea is the alternative.

  • Squoosh squoosh.app

    Drop in an image and drag a slider to see the compressed result update in real time next to the original, which makes it much easier to judge how far you can push a file size before it starts to look bad. Supports modern formats like WebP and AVIF, and runs entirely in your browser so nothing is uploaded anywhere. Built by Google and still one of the better tools of its kind.

  • Photopea photopea.com

    An astonishingly complete image editor that runs in a browser and opens Photoshop files with layers intact. If you only need to crop, retouch or export something occasionally, there is no reason to buy an image editor subscription for that. It supports layer masks, adjustment layers, smart objects and a long list of filters. Free with ads on the side of the interface, or a small paid tier to remove them.

  • Excalidraw excalidraw.com

    A whiteboard that makes everything you draw look pleasingly hand-made, which sounds cosmetic until you notice how much more willing people are to comment on a diagram that does not look finished. Excellent for architecture sketches, flowcharts and explaining an idea in a meeting. Supports live collaboration through a share link with no sign-up, and exports to PNG and SVG. The hand-drawn style can be turned off if you want clean lines.

  • WeTransfer wetransfer.com

    Upload a file, get a link, send the link. No account on either side, up to a couple of gigabytes free per transfer. It is the fastest way to get a big file to somebody who is not on the same chat app as you. Files expire after a few days, which is a feature rather than a bug for one-off sends but means you should not use it for anything archival. Advertising on the download page is heavy on the free tier.

  • iLovePDF ilovepdf.com

    A complete set of PDF tools in one place: merge several documents, split one apart, compress a file that is too big to email, or convert to and from Word, Excel and images. The interface is plain and the processing is fast. Free tier limits the number of files per job to keep the paid plan sellable, but for occasional use you will rarely hit it. Uploaded files are deleted from their servers after a couple of hours.

  • CloudConvert cloudconvert.com

    The format converter to reach for when the thing you have is in a format the thing you need does not accept — video, audio, document, spreadsheet, ebook or image, in almost any combination. It handles the obscure corners other converters ignore, and will happily extract audio from a video or turn a presentation into images. Free conversions are limited by a daily quota measured in minutes, so large video jobs are the thing you will notice.

  • Regex101 regex101.com

    Paste in a regular expression and some test text and it highlights the matches live, then explains the pattern token by token in plain language on the right. That explanation panel is the reason to use it over anything else — it turns an unreadable string of symbols into something you can actually reason about. Supports the flavours used across most languages. Invaluable if you only write regex occasionally and always forget the syntax.

  • Carbon carbon.now.sh

    Paste in a snippet and it renders it as a nicely framed image with a window chrome, syntax highlighting and configurable colours. This became the standard way to share code on social media, and it is still the most polished of the options. You can set the language, theme, padding and background transparent for use over other designs. There is no account and nothing is uploaded.

  • Ray.so ray.so

    Does the same job as Carbon with a more contemporary aesthetic — soft gradients, neat rounded windows, and sensible defaults that mean you do not need to fiddle with anything before exporting. Supports several languages and both light and dark themes, and the output is sized for social sharing out of the box. If you have ever spent five minutes tweaking a code screenshot, this is the tool that removes that step.

  • Coolors coolors.co

    Press the space bar and a fresh five-colour palette appears; lock the ones you like and keep generating around them. It solves the specific problem of needing colours that work together without knowing anything about colour theory. You can export palettes for design tools, check contrast ratios for accessibility, and pick colours straight out of a photograph. Fast enough to use during a meeting.

  • Unsplash unsplash.com

    A large library of professionally shot photographs released under a licence that allows commercial use without attribution or payment. The quality is high enough that a slide deck or landing page looks properly designed with no budget at all. Search works on subject, colour and orientation, which is more useful than it sounds when you need a horizontal image with a lot of empty space for text. Attribution is not required but is appreciated by the photographers.

  • Pexels pexels.com

    Similar licence to Unsplash with the same no-attribution, commercial-use terms, but with a much stronger video section — free stock footage is genuinely hard to find and this is one of the few places that does it well. The photo library is smaller but has plenty of practical business and lifestyle imagery. Useful when you need a ten-second clip as background for something and have no budget.

  • Temp Mail temp-mail.org

    Gives you a working email address instantly that self-destructs after a while, which is what you want for the many sites that demand an address before letting you read anything. The inbox updates live and attachments work. Be sensible about it: never use a disposable address for anything you might need to recover later, since anyone who guesses the address can read the inbox. Great for one-off downloads, terrible for account recovery.

  • tldraw tldraw.com

    Opens straight into an infinite canvas you can draw on immediately, with no login wall and no onboarding. It is more freeform than Excalidraw and better suited to thinking out loud than to producing a polished diagram. There is a good selection of shapes, arrows and sticky notes, and you can share a live session with a link. Perfect for the case where you need to explain something in two minutes and do not want to open a heavy design tool.

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🎬 Watch & Listen 11

Video, music and live radio

  • YouTube youtube.com

    The obvious answer to almost any video need: full-length documentaries, conference talks, ambient background footage, and an effectively infinite supply of short distracting clips. The recommendation feed is engineered to be hard to leave, so the practical advice is to search for the specific thing you want rather than opening the homepage. Background play works in a browser tab, which makes it usable as an audio source while you do something else.

  • Twitch twitch.tv

    Live streams of people playing games, making music, coding, painting or just talking. The reason it belongs on a list like this is the ambient use case: a stream running in a corner of the screen provides company and a low-level sense of activity without demanding attention. Plenty of channels are quiet and chat-free, which is the mode you want. Live video is bandwidth-hungry, so it is the thing to close first if your connection is struggling.

  • Spotify Web Player open.spotify.com

    The complete Spotify catalogue without installing the desktop application — useful on a locked-down work machine where you cannot install software. Playlists, search and the various mood and genre stations all work. The free tier runs advertising and limits how many tracks you can skip, and it occasionally will not play a specific track on demand. Works well alongside a focus playlist for a long stretch of work.

  • SoundCloud soundcloud.com

    The place unsigned and independent artists post music, which means an enormous amount of material that exists nowhere else — remixes, live sets, DJ mixes, demos that never got a proper release. Following a few artists gives you a feed that is genuinely different from any streaming service's algorithm. The downside is quality control: there is a lot of everything, including rough recordings and abandoned uploads.

  • Bandcamp bandcamp.com

    Artists upload albums and you can stream them in full before deciding, which is increasingly rare — most platforms give you thirty seconds and a nag. The catalogue leans toward independent, experimental and niche music, and buying anything sends a genuinely large share of the money to the artist. Many albums are free or pay-what-you-want. The discovery tools are weak, so it works best when you already know what you are looking for.

  • Internet Archive archive.org

    A non-profit library holding an enormous and slightly chaotic collection: public domain films, live concert recordings, old software, radio broadcasts, and snapshots of websites going back to the nineties. The Wayback Machine alone justifies a bookmark, letting you see what any site looked like years ago. Search is imprecise and quality varies wildly, but there is genuinely nothing else like it. Everything is free to browse.

  • Tubi tubitv.com

    A free, ad-supported streaming service with a much deeper catalogue than its low profile suggests — a lot of older films, cult titles and complete series runs that the paid platforms have dropped. No account is needed to start watching. The trade-off is advertising, and there is a fair amount of it. Worth checking before renting anything, because the odds are decent that it is already sitting here for free.

  • Pluto TV pluto.tv

    Works like broadcast television: a list of themed channels that are always running, so you drop into whatever is on rather than choosing something. That is the appeal — no browsing, no decision fatigue, and you cannot binge because the schedule decides. Mostly older series and films, with a surprising number of niche channels devoted to single subjects. Free and ad-supported, no account required.

  • Radio Garden radio.garden

    A 3D globe covered in thousands of green dots, each one a live radio station — click anywhere and you are listening to local radio in Reykjavik, Lagos or rural Brazil. It is the most elegant idea on this list and it turns listening to the radio into an act of exploration. Stations are contributed via a community project, so some streams are dead or buffer badly, but the hit rate is high enough to keep going. No account needed.

  • NTS Radio nts.live

    An independent online radio station with two always-on channels and an enormous archive of past shows, all mixed by people with genuinely good taste across jazz, electronic, ambient, hip-hop and things that do not have a genre name. The shows are long and uninterrupted, which makes it ideal to leave running while you work. The archive is searchable by mood and genre, so you can find a two-hour mix for exactly the afternoon you are having.

  • Letterboxd letterboxd.com

    Part diary, part social network: log what you watch, rate it, and read short reviews from people who take films seriously without taking themselves too seriously. The lists feature is the quiet star — searching for a specific theme reliably turns up a curated list somebody has spent real time on. Useful for deciding what to watch tonight, and dangerous as a general browsing activity, because the reviews are genuinely entertaining.

🎵 Calm Down 9

Noise, music and slow things

  • Rainy Mood rainymood.com

    The original single-purpose rain loop, and still the most reliable — one page, one sound, no controls to fiddle with. Rain is unusually good at masking office noise because it covers the frequency range of conversation without competing for attention. Keep it at low volume and it disappears into the background within a minute. There is a paid app, but the website has done the job for over a decade without one.

  • A Soft Murmur asoftmurmur.com

    Rather than one fixed sound, this gives you a set of sliders — rain, thunder, waves, wind, fire, birds, café chatter, white noise — that you blend yourself. The mixing is the point: matching the sound to your mood takes a few seconds and makes it much less likely you will switch it off. There is a timer for sessions, and settings you can share as a link. Works well on a phone too.

  • Noisli noisli.com

    Combines a sound mixer with a text editor and a pomodoro timer, so the whole focus session lives in one tab: choose your soundscape, set twenty-five minutes, write. The interface is calm and does not try to gamify anything. Palettes are saved between visits, which removes the friction of rebuilding your mix every day. The free tier is generous; the paid tier adds offline use and playback on more devices.

  • MyNoise mynoise.net

    The most sophisticated sound generator here by some distance: dozens of carefully recorded soundscapes, each with a graphic equaliser you can adjust across ten frequency bands, so you can add or remove exactly the frequencies that distract you. Built by an audio engineer and it shows. Genuinely useful for anyone sensitive to specific noises, like nearby speech or keyboard clatter. Everything is free, funded by donations.

  • Lofi Cafe lofi.cafe

    A handful of always-on lo-fi channels, each with a slightly different mood, wrapped in an interface that is a pleasure to look at — animated backgrounds and a clean player that sits quietly in the corner. Lo-fi works as work music because it has enough texture to mask noise but not enough melodic content to pull your attention. Free, no account, runs happily in a background tab for hours.

  • Chillhop chillhop.com

    The label behind a lot of the lo-fi you have heard on study playlists runs its own 24-hour stream, plus a catalogue of releases you can browse. The music is jazz-influenced instrumental hip-hop, consistently well produced, and the live stream means you never have to choose a track. A solid default for a long stretch of focused work. There is also a seasonal playlist that changes what is on air.

  • Music for Programming musicforprogramming.net

    A long-running series of hour-long mixes, each accompanied by a page of notes about the music and about programming. The selections avoid lyrics and obvious hooks, which is exactly the property that makes them hold up over a two-hour stretch. There is no player chrome to distract you and no algorithm making decisions — you pick an episode and it plays. A cult favourite for a reason.

  • Poolsuite FM poolsuite.net

    An internet radio station styled as a 1980s resort advertisement — sun-drenched graphics, old-school typography, and a soundtrack of relaxed funk, disco and synth. The whole page is a small piece of design work, which makes it a pleasure to leave open. The music is exactly the holiday-adjacent mood it promises. Skip it if what you actually need is silence rather than atmosphere.

  • Explore.org explore.org

    A network of live cameras pointed at wildlife — bears fishing at a waterfall, eagles in a nest, kittens in a shelter, a coral reef — running continuously with no commentary. It is the most effective thing here for bringing your heart rate down, and it is genuinely well produced by a non-profit foundation. Cameras occasionally go offline or show a static view for hours, particularly overnight, so try a couple.

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📚 Learn Something 10

Ten minutes that leave you smarter

  • Wikipedia wikipedia.org

    You know what it is; the reason it belongs on this list is the specific hazard of the link chains. Open one article and follow the tangents and you will surface forty minutes later with a working knowledge of something completely unrelated to your job. The citation sections are the genuinely valuable part — they are a curated reading list on whatever you just looked up. Available in hundreds of languages, ad-free and donation-funded.

  • Khan Academy khanacademy.org

    A complete, free curriculum covering maths, science, economics, history and more, with video explanations and exercises that adapt to what you keep getting wrong. The maths track in particular is far better than most paid alternatives, and it goes genuinely deep. Progress tracking makes it a real study tool rather than a video library. Entirely free, run as a non-profit, no advertising.

  • Coursera coursera.org

    Courses from universities and companies, most of which can be audited for free — the paid part buys you a certificate and graded assignments, not the lectures. The range is enormous, from introductory programming to quite specialist graduate material, and the best courses have genuinely good production values. Commitment is the thing to watch: many courses run for weeks, so it is worth checking the syllabus before starting one at the beginning of a busy period.

  • edX edx.org

    A non-profit platform carrying courses from major universities, with a more academic tone than its commercial equivalents — you will find rigorous treatments of subjects that other platforms skip. Many courses can be audited free, with paid verification for certificates. The discussion forums on the better courses are worth reading on their own. Expect real workload if you actually do the assignments.

  • Brilliant brilliant.org

    Teaches concepts through short interactive problems instead of lectures, which turns out to be a much better fit for a ten-minute break — you make progress in the time you have rather than watching half a video. Covers maths, logic, physics, computer science and data. The free tier gives you a limited number of problems a day, so the subscription is what unlocks the full paths. Genuinely well designed.

  • MIT OpenCourseWare ocw.mit.edu

    MIT publishes the actual materials from thousands of its courses — lecture notes, problem sets, exams with solutions, and recordings of lectures where they exist. It is not a guided course; you get the raw material and decide what to do with it. For anyone who wants to see what a serious undergraduate treatment of a subject looks like, this is unmatched and completely free with no registration.

  • Duolingo duolingo.com

    The gamification is what makes it work: streaks, leagues and daily goals turn language practice into something you actually return to, which matters more than pedagogy for the first few months. The courses vary in quality — the major European languages are much stronger than the less common ones. Ten minutes a day is the designed unit, and it is a genuinely good use of a coffee break. The free tier is fully usable; the subscription removes ads and adds practice tools.

  • Wolfram Alpha wolframalpha.com

    Ask it a question with a definite answer and it computes rather than searches: solve an equation, differentiate a function, plot data, convert units, check a date, look up a physical constant. It shows the steps for many mathematical problems, which makes it genuinely useful for checking your own working rather than just getting an answer. Typing in plain English mostly works, though precise notation gives much better results.

  • Our World in Data ourworldindata.org

    Research and data on the big global questions — energy, health, population, poverty, food, climate — organised as readable articles built around well-made charts, with the underlying data downloadable. The tone is unusually careful: it reports what the evidence supports and explicitly flags where it does not. A good antidote to the confident half-truths that circulate on the same subjects. Free, non-profit, no paywall.

  • Atlas Obscura atlasobscura.com

    A collaboratively built atlas of unusual places and phenomena: a lake that turns animals to stone, a library of smells, the world's loneliest tree, tunnels you can visit under a city. Every entry is short enough to read in a minute, which makes it dangerously easy to read twenty in a row. The map view is excellent for finding oddities near somewhere you are actually travelling to. Free to browse, with optional membership.

🔄 The list gets updated from time to time

No submissions, no waiting list, no sign-up of any kind.

  • 1 Every entry is picked and checked by hand. New sites go in whenever something genuinely worth opening turns up.
  • 2 Links that stop working are removed at the same time, so the list stays worth reading rather than merely long.
  • 3 Nothing here is paid for and nothing is added automatically. Bookmark the page and check back whenever you need something to open.