UK resources
blocked.org.uk
Check the status of or report websites that are geoblocked thanks to the Online Safety Act.
2025-11-01
House martin sightings and rehabilitation
housemartinconservation.com
For UK and Ireland. The House Martin Conservation group has information on what to do if you find an injured martin and how to report sightings. (The group needs details of still-present colonies so that rehabbed birds can be released into them or at least into migration hotspots, so that they have the best chance of migrating south.)
2025-11-01
use-their-id.com
Generates a simulacrum of your local MP's driving licence, which can be used to fool services demanding proof of age under the Online Safety Act. Tee hee!
2025-11-01
communityrepairnetwork.org.uk
A map of repair cafes and other repair groups in the UK.
2025-11-01
writetothem.com
A site that lets you look up your MP and councillors and contact them.
2025-11-01
Personal, hobby and project sites
Old web/personal sites I enjoyed visiting
autisticasfxxk.com
Blog posts and guides by an autistic with selective mutism.
2025-11-02
bestiaexmachina.com
One of my long-time internet pals' sites. Here be industrial music and crab monsters!
2025-12-06
bogleech.com
Decades' worth of articles about arthropods and reviews of pop-culture monsters.
2025-11-01
goblincat.neocities.org
A personal site styled as an old mansion with gorgeous pixel art.
2025-12-06
linwood.neocities.org
A personal site styled as a nature centre with hiking trails.
2025-12-06
mycorrhiza.space
I like the curation of all the items in the links, especially the resources on the 'Staycation' page. (Some pages are accessible only through the sitemap; unsure if by accident.)
2025-12-06
ribo.zone
Charmingly-presented site with information on bugs and micro-organisms.
2025-12-06
Fiction and poetry
I sexually identify as an attack helicopter — Isabel Fall [PDF]
isabelfall.neocities.org
An excellent piece of sci-fi that got the poor author bullied off the internet by people who only read the title.
2025-11-01
Worldbuilding
cityofnodd.com
City of Nodd is an encyclopedia about a magical city and its inhabitants, who have to act in decadent and depraved ways to keep the city appeased. It's so cool and re-visiting it always makes me excited to create! Be warned, it's NSFW as hell.
2025-11-01
mysteryfleshpitnationalpark.com
This is one of my favourite pieces of worldbuilding. The Mystery Flesh Pit blog is a collection of 'information' about a subterranean national park… made of meat. I think the author does a great job of presenting it, balancing it between the horrifying and the goofy, and mixing cohesive world building with enough ambiguity to keep it mysterious.
Plus, I'm just extremely impressed by how the author manages to produce such a spread of multimedia. I love the graphic design of the warning signage especially.
2025-11-01
Books, zines, and guides
fourmilab.ch
This was brought to my attention when I asked if anyone had recommendations for 'open-source' weight-loss plans (as opposed to closed-source plans like Slimming World, which is a black box for how it calculates its points values). The Hacker's Diet is essentially just calorie-counting, but framed in a way that's more helpful than just 'eat less'.
2025-11-01
Ratfactor's Illustrated Guide to Folding Fitted Sheets
ratfactor.com
A guide to this tedious task laid out in a way I could actually understand.
2025-11-01
traumbooks.itch.io
Coping strategies for feeding yourself when you have no energy.
2025-11-01
In-browser games and toys
For desktop view
woodgears.ca
JavaScript-based game where you attempt to bisect angles and complete shapes by eye.
2026-03-08
For mobile view
Rabbit holes
The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans
otherhand.org
A family of Germans disappeared in Death Valley in 1996 - their rental car was found, but not the bodies. The blogger puts together where they might have gone based on misconceptions about the area they probably had.
2023-03-08
Resources for creators
Digital art and web design
meyerweb.com
Select two hex codes and generate a spread of intermediates. Good for making palettes. Lightweight self-contained page; can be downloaded and run offline.
2025-11-01
paletton.com
Select a colour (by hex code if desired) and get a congruent palette of adjacent or contrasting colours.
2025-11-01
Typefaces
juliamono.netlify.app
A monospaced font 'for scientific and technical computing'. Has many glyphs. Free.
2025-11-02
v3x3d.itch.io
A 14x14 pixel art font with a hand-drawn scribble style. Creator Vexed has many more pixel art fonts and assets on their Itch.io page; this is just my favourite one. Not free but cheap, and the creator often sells font bundles.
2025-11-02
Illustration and photography
Avoiding Tangents: 9 Visual Blunders Every Artist Should Watch Out For
emptyeasel.com
Useful article that taught me what tangents were.
2025-11-01
Physical materials
thistothat.com
Recommends specific adhesives for gluing one material to another. US-centric; it sometimes recommends brands that don't exist elsewhere.
2025-11-09
Webmaster resources
Bones
neatnik.net
A nice and concise guide. It assumes you're confident inputting commands in a terminal and doesn't assume any specialised knowledge beyond that.
2026-03-08
ache.one
Create an HTML zip bomb for AI crawlers not respecting the 'robots.txt' file. A zip bomb is a huge file that compresses to a much smaller size. The AI crawler will uncompress it and see all its memory being consumed, leading to a possible crash.
2025-11-01
Meat
css-tricks.com
A comprehensive guide to flexboxes in CSS. Flexboxes are so useful for responsive design; I use them on most of my pages.
2025-11-01
css-tricks.com
A comprehensive guide to grids in CSS. I found grids hard to get my head around at first, but they're very powerful. Grids aren't 100% a replacement for HTML tables, but they're much better for layouts (tables have their place for actually displaying tabulated data), and easier to use for this than tables once you get how they work.
2025-11-01
justaqrcode.com
One-page site that generates a QR-code entirely within the browser; no login or trackers. Can be downloaded and run offline.
2025-11-02
mat.tl
Demo of how to create a URL shortener using list-item IDs. What the page doesn't make explicit is that there's a bit of inline JavaScript handling the redirects — check the source code.
2025-11-02
Skin
webaim.org
Compare two hex codes and check they meet accessibility requirements for readability.
2025-11-01
thelcars.com
A webpage template for emulating LCARS (the computer displays seen in Star Trek). Done without any images; just CSS. Includes sound effects. Not something I think I want to use for myself, but I dig that someone made it.
2025-11-01
Targetting specific characters with CSS rules
shkspr.mobi
A way to apply CSS styles to certain characters without having to wrap said characters in extra markup. Of limited use case, but fun.
2025-11-01
whatismyviewport.com
Useful for testing whether your site works in smaller browser windows.
2025-11-02
Tools and software
Remove [at.tumblr.com] on link shares
onrender.com
Automatically strips all the gubbins from a copied Tumblr URL.
2026-03-08
neatnik.net
Automatically fits on a single sheet of paper when printed. Change the year in the URL.
2026-03-08
cobalt.tools
A site that lets you download audio and video off most other websites. Has 0 trackers or data retention.
2025-11-01
idonthavespotify.sjdonado.com
This site "translates" Spotify links to other music services, including Tidal and Deezer.
2025-11-01
Uncategorised articles
thenewinquiry.co
"Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain. Build inside the storms."
A heartbreaking article by game developer Charity Heartscape about her experience of being maliciously targeted. I found this article when someone shared it with the words "i think a good question to ask yourself when trying to decide how to handle an online community is “would this behavior lead to me HALing someone under the wrong circumstances” if yes, consider alternatives".
2025-11-01
PAL retro games deserve to be preserved, respected, and re-released
kimimithegameeatingshemonster.com
"Remember the NES' utter dominance of the 8-bit era? Or the terrible video game crash 1983? I don't and unless you’ve lived in America you don’t either."
2025-11-01
How a discovery in Yellowstone National Park led to the development of PCR
richmondscientific.com
An example of the value of science being impossible to predict and often being realised decades after it's done.
2025-11-01
Yes, the SEGA Saturn was designed with 3D in mind
xtof.info
"There is a widespread belief stating that the SEGA Saturn is a 2D power-house, but not very good at 3D because those capabilities were added as an afterthought. "This article will try to demonstrate that, on the contrary, SEGA was very serious about 3D and that the Saturn was engineered to be very capable in this domain. Mistakes were made, but not because the engineers did not look at 3D seriously or were incompetents."
2025-11-01
Runaway and derailment of TasRail freight train no. 604 [PDF]
atsb.gov.au
"There was also no explicit regulatory requirement for developers of rail equipment to demonstrate an objective evaluation of design safety or apply system safety principles during development."
Required reading for aspiring computer-touchers.
2025-11-02
obscuritory.com
This was a fascinating read and I'd love to try this game.
2026-03-08
I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI - and it only took 20 minutes
bbc.co.uk
The use of the word 'hacked' in the headline is a bit self-aggrandising. However, it does show how easily AI slop engines can be manipulated.
2026-03-08
How far back in time can you understand English?
deadlanguagesociety.com
Everything from the 1300s onwards is pretty much modern English spelled funny. The 1200s and earlier is when we start seeing Germanic vocabulary that's harder to parse.
2026-03-08
What the hell
lyra.horse
"x86CSS is a working CSS-only x86 CPU/emulator/computer. Yes, the Cascading Style Sheets CSS. No JavaScript required." Chromium-based browser required to run.
2026-03-08