Cool Websites — August 13, 2026

Thirty corners of the internet worth bookmarking, from honeypot generators to a wiki that fits in one HTML file.

🔐 Security & Privacy

Canarytokens

Plant a fake AWS key, a rigged Word doc, or a booby-trapped QR code somewhere sensitive, and the free service pings you the moment anyone touches it. Built by the same team behind the commercial Canary honeypot, it ships 40+ trap types and needs no account.

AnonPaste

Pastes and files up to 5GB get encrypted in the browser before they ever reach the server, so even AnonPaste can't read what you shared. Burn-after-view links and expiry timers come free; a paid tier just raises the ceiling.

ViewBurn

Sends a link that self-destructs the instant someone opens it: the encrypted content vanishes from the server on first read, no copy left behind. A locked "Read Mode" even blocks screenshotting the message on the recipient's end.

PassCheck.io

Runs entropy math and breach checks against a password entirely inside your browser tab, never sending it anywhere. Handy for auditing up to 50 passwords at once before a password-manager migration.

🕵️ OSINT & Investigation

Maigret

Feed it a username and it checks around 3,000 sites for matching profiles, pulling out linked bios, photos, and related accounts along the way. The web version only scans the top 100 sites for free. The full sweep needs the local Python/Docker build, worth knowing before you rely on it for a real search.

CellMapper

A crowdsourced map of actual cell tower locations, frequencies, and coverage, filterable by carrier. It's the kind of infrastructure data telecoms don't publish themselves. Browsing is free; contributing new tower data requires a (also free) account.

Global Fishing Watch

Combines AIS ship-tracking data with satellite imagery to show which vessels are fishing where, in something close to real time. Built to catch illegal fishing in protected waters, but the open map and API work for any maritime-activity research.

EXIFTool Online

Drop in a photo and it pulls every scrap of embedded metadata — GPS coordinates, camera model, edit history — then plots the location on a map if there is one. Everything runs client-side, so the file itself never leaves your machine.

🤖 AI Tools

Explain Paper

Upload a dense academic PDF, highlight the sentence that lost you, and get a plain-language explanation with room to keep asking follow-ups. Free tier covers unlimited highlights on standard models; a $16/month plan swaps in stronger ones.

Fireflies.ai

Joins your Zoom or Meet call, transcribes it, and hands back a summary with action items pulled out automatically. The free plan caps storage and minutes, which is usually the first thing that pushes teams to upgrade.

Clipdrop

Stability AI's grab-bag of browser image tools. The standout is Cleanup, which erases an unwanted person or object from a photo and fills the gap convincingly in one click. Background removal, 4x upscaling, and text-to-image live in the same free toolkit.

🛠️ Developer Tools

Hurl

API tests written as plain text files instead of clicked together in a GUI collection: chain requests, capture values, assert on JSON or XPath, then check the file into your repo like any other test. Built in Rust on libcurl, it ships as one dependency-free binary and outputs JUnit reports CI can actually parse.

Eraser

Describe a system in a sentence or paste in a code snippet, and it lays out an architecture diagram or ER diagram you can then drag around by hand. The useful part is getting from blank page to a real starting layout instead of dragging boxes from zero.

🎬 Video & Image Tools

Openverse

Searches over 800 million openly-licensed images and audio clips pulled from places like the Smithsonian and NASA, and writes the attribution text for you. Free, no account, run by the WordPress project as the successor to Creative Commons' old search tool.

BIRME

Drag in an entire folder of photos and resize, crop, or convert all of them at once, nudging each image's individual crop box if the batch defaults miss. It's been processing everything locally in the browser since 2013, no upload required.

🖥️ IT & Sysadmin Tools

crt.sh

Searches Certificate Transparency logs for every SSL certificate ever issued to a domain, which surfaces subdomains a DNS scan would never catch. Run by Sectigo, free, no API key, no rate limit.

Security Headers

Point it at any URL and it grades the site's HTTP response headers — CSP, HSTS, X-Frame-Options — then spells out exactly what's missing. No account needed for the scanner itself.

📋 Productivity & Collaboration

file.kiwi

Uploads start sharing before they finish, transfers resume if interrupted, and there's no file-size cap. The whole thing is client-side AES-GCM encrypted, so the decryption key never touches the server. Files expire automatically after 90 hours; no account, no ads.

TiddlyWiki

A wiki that lives as a single HTML file with no server or database. Notes ("tiddlers") link to each other freely instead of sitting in folders. It's been actively maintained since 2004, which says something about how durable the single-file idea turned out to be.

📚 Learning & Reference

It's Nicky Case!

A collection of "explorable explanations" you manipulate instead of just read: drag sliders in a game-theory simulation to watch cooperation collapse, or nudge a segregation model and watch neighborhoods sort themselves. Everything's public domain, ad-free, and playable with no login.

SQL Murder Mystery

Query a SQLite crime database to track down a killer, starting from a police report and working through joins and filters like an actual investigation instead of a multiple-choice quiz. Free, built by Northwestern's Knight Lab, runs entirely in the browser.

🎮 Games

Slow Roads

An endless, procedurally generated road through shifting landscapes. No score, no goal, no download, just driving. Adjust the weather and time of day and let it run as ambient background the way some people use lo-fi playlists.

Puzzmo

A daily puzzle hub from designers Zach Gage and Orta Therox, rotating through a crossword, a Spelling-Bee-style word game, a chess variant, and original formats like Flipart. Free covers five puzzles a day; a $40/year plan adds leaderboards.

WorldGuessr

Drops you into Google Street View and makes you guess where in the world you are, basically GeoGuessr, except this fan-built version is free for unlimited rounds instead of gated behind a subscription.

✈️ Travel

Wanderu

Compares bus and train tickets from 500+ carriers across North America and Europe and books directly on the site. The tool to reach for on regional trips where flying is overkill and Google Flights has nothing to say.

ITA Matrix

The routing engine that actually powers Google Flights and Kayak under the hood, exposed with far more fare-construction control than any consumer site offers. You can't book here. You build the exact itinerary, then go find and price it somewhere else, which is exactly why flight-deal hunters swear by it.

💰 Money & Finance

Networthify

Plug in your savings rate and it estimates how many years until financial independence, then shows how many of those years disappear if you cut a specific expense. Built by an early-retirement blogger as a faster alternative to building your own spreadsheet.

Doctor of Credit

Tracks current bank-account opening bonuses and credit-card sign-up offers with a running deal calendar updated daily. The niche readership optimizes banking and credit-card rewards the way other people optimize flight miles.

🌀 Fun / Weird Internet

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

Pick any two Wikipedia articles and it finds the shortest chain of hyperlinks connecting them, drawn out as a path graph. Try it with two absurdly unrelated topics and lose twenty minutes.

Scale of the Universe 2

A zoom slider that scrolls from quarks and neutrinos out to the observable universe, with everything sized at true relative scale as you go. Built by teenage twin brothers, still free, still no app required.

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30 sites this week. Found something broken or have a site to suggest? Reply to the email.