Awesome Websites

Stressed after a long day at work? Head over to the Pluvior website, go full screen, and unwind to the pitter-patter of raindrops on your screen. As the virtual rain falls, you can tweak other sounds like wind, lightning, and urban ambiance. We wish the raindrop simulation was tied to the sound intensity, though.

This clever online clock by The Pudding automatically plays songs with the current time in the title. While we’ve heard of 12:51 by The Strokes and 10:15 Saturday Night by The Cure, we had no idea there were so many other time-titled tunes out there. The album art on the turntable is a neat idea, too.

If there’s one thing that’s super-frustrating about websites and apps, it’s the increasingly-complex password requirements brought about by the need to thwart hackers. Developer Neal Agarwal decided to turn the challenging process of selecting a password that meets all requirements into a game. Good luck getting past Rule 10 without breaking Rule 5.

Emoji Supply’s Emoji Kitchen lets you cook up new emojis by combining two existing emoji into one. Want a monkey eating a hot dog? Sure! An angry guy with a monocle? No problem! Not every permutation is available, but there are lots to choose from. The combinations are also available in the Android keyboard Gboard.

Created by Jason Scott and a team of dedicated tech archivists, Discmaster provides online access to more than 91 million files from CD-ROMs and floppy disks collected by the Internet Archive. The retro-style search interface lets you directly view images and play video and audio files from the disks.

We recently went down the rabbit hole, creating a playlist of original versions of hit songs. SecondHandSongs helped us find lots of obscure originals and also revealed tons of unique covers we never knew existed. Like, did you know that this guy recorded Girls Just Wanna Have Fun four years before Cindy Lauper did?

Feeling gloomy? Things could be worse. An asteroid could smash into your house. Neal.fun’s Asteroid Launcher simulates the approximate impact of an asteroid slamming into the Earth in a location of your choice. The website lets you select a type of asteroid and adjust its diameter, speed, and impact angle.

The 1982 movie Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance was a fascinating experimental film that combined slow motion and time-lapse footage with music by Phillip Glass to illustrate humanity’s impact on the world. Monkeon’s Gifaanisqatsi generates movies using a similar technique, only with random animated GIFs.

Want to know how long that gadget you’re about to buy is gonna last? ExitReviews offers crowdsourced product reviews on longevity, descriptions of what went wrong, and encourages other users to post fixes. Most of the items posted to date are consumer electronics, but there are some wearables and household items too.

Long for the startup sound of your old Macintosh? Or perhaps the squeal of a dial-up modem? Save the Sounds’ Museum of Endangered Sounds offers an online soundboard where you can enjoy the sounds of retro technology any time you’re feeling nostalgic. Try playing them all at the same time for fun.

This online time-waster is an endless canvas where anyone can post messages and create art entirely from ASCII characters. It provides an ever-changing environment that will have you coming back to see how it evolves. Be aware, since it’s unmoderated, you can expect some offensive text and images to sneak in.

Developer Dylan Turner’s online music maker lets you build sequences by placing sound blocks in 3-dimensional space. Each composition doubles as a work of visual art. Intimidated? Try their community-submitted tracks, including Coldplay’s Clocks, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata 3rd Movement, and the Nyan Cat theme.

myNoise is a wonderful website where you can customize ambient sounds. Use its EQ sliders to finetune over 250 soundscapes for relaxation, meditation, or just to provide a calm background for your workday. Sounds can be bookmarked, played in a mini-player, or purchased as a downloadable MP3 file.

While laws like GDPR and CCPA are intended to protect our privacy, they’ve also resulted in some really annoying user experiences. Comedian Stevie Martin vents her frustration about the complex and confusing array of cookie preferences she encountered when all she wanted to do is look at a recipe for cookies.

Are you sick and tired of conference calls? Zoom Escaper can help. The website works with virtual audio device software to intercept your microphone on its way to conferencing apps, and can inject annoyances like an upset baby, construction, barking dogs, or a crackly connection to get you off the hook.

Wix enables business professionals, personal brands, or just individuals who want to publish their work online create professional-looking and functional websites. There are over 500 designer-made templates to choose from and a wide variety of intuitive tools available to help you customize everything. Get started.

Amanda Ghassaei created this wonderful this online plaything which lets you create virtual origami constructions and view them in 3D. You can choose how flat or folded the virtual paper is, and select from a variety of models to tinker with. You can also import SVG or FOLD files, and export both the 3D models and folding patterns.

Google Arts and Culture and David Li present an experimental plaything that lets anyone create their own opera masterpiece. Blob Opera uses machine learning tech to create operatic sounds as you play with four blobby creatures that produce bass, tenor, mezzo-soprano, and soprano vocals. Sing and share!

Need to find a sound effect for a recording project? Freesound.org is a collaboratively-managed database of sounds you can use under one of several Creative Commons licenses. We found all kinds of unusual noises there, from a growling ogre, to creepy atmospheric music, to a delightfully ASMR pencil scribbling on paper.

Remember when Excite!, Lycos, and Geocities were a thing? In one of its more fascinating moving bar charts, Data Is Beautiful looks back at the history of the Internet over more than two decades, tracking the biggest websites based on monthly visits. Yes, there was a time before Google, Facebook, and YouTube.

Love Instagram but hate all the clutter? Check out Ben Howdle’s Filtergram. It’s a website that lets you follow Instagram accounts and view just their posts and captions. No ads, no comments. The downside? You have to know the name of the account you want to follow.

Having trouble finding someone to game with on the Nintendo Switch? Switcher.gg can solve that. It’s a website that connects Switch players. Enter the games you own and whether you want to play locally or online. You can also share your friend code and Discord tag.

If you sometimes imagine yourself starring in a sci-fi flick, being a villain of a high-tech fortress, or just love looking at buttons, knobs, dials and displays, Control Panel is for you. It’s a crowdsourced blog that highlights its namesake through photos, animated gifs and videos.