Websites for When You Need to Get Things Done

#productivity #education #technology #tools

A practical collection of useful websites and online tools for research, learning, development, design, productivity, privacy, entertainment, and everyday tasks.

The list is organized by purpose, making it easy to find the right tool when you need it. Some are well-known, while others are smaller and more specialized sites that are worth keeping around.

Think of it as a personal toolbox for the web - places to check when you need to research something, build something, solve a problem, or simply find a better way to get something done.

Research and Learning

gutenberg.org - Project Gutenberg: over 70,000 public domain books, free to read.
openculture.com - Free courses from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and other universities.
wolframalpha.com - Solves math, physics, and engineering problems and shows its work.
elicit.com (moved from elicit.org) - An AI research assistant that searches 138 million papers, summarizes them, and pulls the data into tables with source links.
consensus.app - Answers research questions with a straight yes, no, or it's complicated, based on peer-reviewed papers.
connectedpapers.com - Maps the citation links between papers as a visual graph, handy for finding related work.
semanticscholar.org - Free academic search engine, built by the Allen Institute for AI.
scispace.com (formerly Typeset.io) - Helps you work through a dense paper: explains terms, finds related work, pulls out data.
summarize.tech - Turns a long YouTube video into a timestamped text summary.

Developer Tools

carbon.now.sh - Turns code into nice-looking images for tweets or slides, dozens of themes.
ray.so - Same idea, from Raycast: sharp-looking code screenshots.
regex101.com - Test regular expressions online, with a breakdown of what each part does.
codebeautify.org - Formats and minifies code in dozens of languages.
jsonformatter.org - Makes JSON readable and checks it for errors.
explainshell.com - Breaks a terminal command down piece by piece and explains every flag.

Design and Presentation

shots.so - Free device mockups for showing off apps and websites.
smartmockups.com - Mockups without touching Photoshop, free tier available.

Security and Privacy

haveibeenpwned.com - Checks whether your email or password has turned up in a known data breach.
virustotal.com - Scans a file or link with dozens of antivirus engines at once. Owned by Google.
privnote.com - Creates a note that deletes itself after it's read once.
temp-mail.org - A disposable inbox for signing up to things.
10minutemail.com - Same idea, but the address only lasts ten minutes.
file.io - Share a file through a link that stops working once it's downloaded.

Productivity

raindrop.io - A bookmark manager with tags, folders, and full-text search.
downdetector.com - Shows whether a site or service is down for everyone, not just you.
fast.com - Netflix's speed test. No ads, no clutter.
similarsites.com - Finds sites similar to whatever one you give it.
alternativeto.net - A directory of free and open-source alternatives to popular software.

Sound for Focus

radio.garden - Listen to radio stations from around the world through an interactive globe.
everynoise.com - A map of music genres, built from Spotify data.
tunefind.com - Figures out what song was playing in that one scene from a movie or show.
musicforprogramming.net - Ambient mixes for working in the background, running since 2011.
mynoise.net - Customizable noise generators (rain, cafe, white noise) with dozens of sliders to dial it in.
coffitivity.com - Coffee shop background noise, for anyone who works better without total silence.