This site needs more people to know about it (and it was only one guy called Iain MacDonald maintaining it. I think one other person joined him recently).
It’s called NewsMap. It’s a wall of headlines that updates over time. No distractions, no images and you can choose your region and the topics you want to see. The dude revived it after the original site went down for some reason a few years ago. Pretty cool, specially for my ADHD brain.
It’s super cool, if only it wasn’t pulling from Google exclusively.
So, correct me if I’m wrong by all means, but Google News is just the channel isn’t it? Right now I’m seeing content on there from a dozen different news organisations (BBC, Reuters, Sky News, The Guardian, The Telegraph etc.)
What’s the negative with it being conveyed via Google News?
It’s an aggregator but I have zero trust in Google to not be involved with subtle content manipulation and censorship. However it’s mostly out of principal. I deGoogled my life already, so using this would go against that stance.
It’s a lot of really random stuff. I go through a few sites now and again instead of doom scrolling and I always seem to find at least one really interesting or fun thing.
A lot of the personal project sites and just weird stuff feels like the old internet and it makes me happy
Have you ever seen a letter or symbol somewhere that was not in copyable text and wondered how to even go about searching for what it is called? https://shapecatcher.com/ Just draw the symbol you see and it will find Unicode symbols close to it. Very useful.
https://deconstructor.app/ It’s an etymology search engine of sorts. It has some of that AI hallucination crap, but overall its surprisingly accurate ( I am a linguist).
Wiktionary has this without the AI hallucinations.
ImgOps. Add
imgops.com/to any random image URL on the internet and get quick links to a bigger version, look it the source on SauceNAO, or search Google, Yandex, or TinEye. I always run art through ImgOps before posting here.If you want to tie your shoes, Ian’s shoelace website.
Way too much in depth on a niche topic, but that’s why it’s so awesome
I have been seeing shoelace infographics since I was a teen on ifunny, and only 14 years later do I finally get to find out where its from!
I am happy to have participated in that connection.
Want to know what possibility for harvesting a particular element is, from the ocean?
click on it in https://www.mbari.org/know-your-ocean/periodic-table-of-elements-in-the-ocean/
( scroll down a bit )
& see a new page open up, identifying how abundant/not it is, & the top-to-bottom-gradient of it…
Rare-earths may be sufficiently harvestable from the ocean using Metal-Organic-Frameworks, for coastal de-salination plants, or tidal-power-plants, if done at scale…
( which would break national-monopolies, wouldn’t it? )
just don’t bother trying to mine iridium through that method: you’ll never get enough to make it worthwhile.
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/
lets you easily see what old websites and software looked like, often over multiple years.
If you want to make a big poster by printing smaller sheets of printer paper, all the first page of Google results is sites that let you upload your image and then make you sign up for an account. So here’s https://bigspread.niy.ai/ instead
Now I’m curious which posters you’re printing.
Stuff for classroom walls
Linuxdaw.org, an awesome database of VSTs (virtual instruments) and effects that natively support Linux. It’s a great resource for musicians trying to escape the enshittification and spying if Windows.
I don’t know how unknown it is but nobody has mentioned it yet so https://www.wolframalpha.com/
For those who enjoy the zen of wrenching
That’s epic
Mindblow: Find websites pertaining to local affairs.
There are very interesting events I go to in my local area, but we don’t often think about how much of our lives on phones are built around what’s happening 300 miles away from us.
Find a website where some interesting event or discovery might lead to you actually saying hello in person to someone.
These are actually blog posts that list such things:
A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites (Updated 2026)
No Logins Required: Alternative Interfaces To YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram
https://chestofbooks.com/crafts/index.html - has a bunch of stuff from old USA books and magazines. Seems that the Crafts section is the most impressive
