Useful websites worth bookmarking

The internet is still good at being useful, which is easy to forget when the loudest parts of it are trying to sell us something, scare us, or make us watch one more short video before we go do anything else.

I asked ChatGPT to help pull together a list of useful websites from the kind of Reddit threads where people share the obscure tools, archives, references, and odd little utilities they still keep bookmarked. The result was a long list, and like most AI-generated lists, it needed a human pass. Some links were obvious. Some were too commercial. Some were not the sort of thing I would point people toward from my own site.

But the larger point survived the cleanup: the web is still full of places that reward curiosity.

Here is a more organized version of that list, with sites that are useful for research, teaching, writing, coding, tinkering, traveling, or simply wandering around when the internet starts to feel too small.

Search and Research

  • Google Scholar
    Academic search without having to start from a general web search.
  • Semantic Scholar
    A research tool that can help surface papers, authors, citations, and related work.
  • Wolfram Alpha
    A computational answer engine that remains one of the stranger and more impressive corners of the web.
  • Library of Congress
    A massive historical and cultural archive.
  • Project Gutenberg
    Free public-domain books in a format that still feels refreshingly direct.
  • Internet Archive
    Books, old software, music, video, web pages, and the broader memory of the internet.
  • Open Library
    An ambitious attempt to build a web page for every book.
  • WorldCat
    A global catalog for finding books and library holdings.
  • JSTOR Open Content
    Free access to selected academic books, journals, and primary sources.
  • DOAJ
    A directory of open access journals.

Learning and Education

  • MIT OpenCourseWare
    Course materials from MIT, open to anyone.
  • Khan Academy
    Lessons and practice exercises across a wide range of subjects.
  • Coursera
    Online courses from universities and companies.
  • edX
    Another major platform for university-backed online learning.
  • OpenStax
    Free textbooks that are especially useful for students trying to keep costs down.
  • Saylor Academy
    Free and low-cost online courses.
  • freeCodeCamp
    Programming practice, projects, and certifications.
  • Exercism
    Code practice with mentoring and a useful language-by-language structure.
  • FutureLearn
    Online courses with a broad mix of academic and professional topics.
  • Alison
    Free online courses and training modules.

Programming and Technology

  • MDN Web Docs
    Still the first place I check for web platform documentation.
  • Stack Overflow
    Messy, useful, occasionally humbling, and still part of how programming gets done.
  • GitHub
    Code hosting, project discovery, issue tracking, and the public notebook of modern software.
  • GitLab
    A capable alternative for hosting and managing software projects.
  • DevDocs
    Fast documentation lookup in one place.
  • Can I Use
    Browser support tables for web features.
  • Roadmap.sh
    Learning paths for developers who want a map before they start wandering.
  • OverAPI
    Cheat sheets for programming languages and tools.
  • Regex101
    A regular expression tester that explains what your pattern is doing.
  • CodePen
    A good place to test and share front-end experiments.

AI and Productivity

  • OpenAI
    The source for ChatGPT and OpenAI’s developer tools.
  • Claude
    Anthropic’s AI assistant.
  • Perplexity
    Search-style AI answers with source links.
  • NotebookLM
    A useful tool for working with your own source material.
  • Hugging Face
    Models, datasets, demos, and a large machine learning community.
  • Poe
    A place to try multiple AI models from one interface.
  • Gamma
    AI-assisted presentations and documents.
  • Napkin AI
    Turns text into diagrams and visual explanations.

PDFs and Documents

  • Sejda
    Browser-based PDF editing and conversion tools.
  • iLovePDF
    A straightforward collection of PDF tools.
  • Smallpdf
    PDF compression, conversion, and editing.
  • PDF24 Tools
    A large set of free PDF utilities.
  • DocHub
    PDF signing, annotation, and form filling.
  • TinyWow
    File tools for PDFs, images, video, and more.
  • CloudConvert
    Converts files between many formats.
  • Zamzar
    Another long-running file conversion service.

Audio, Video and Media

  • Vocal Remover
    Separate vocals and instrumentals from a song.
  • Audacity
    A free audio editor that has been useful forever.
  • Photopea
    A surprisingly capable image editor that runs in the browser.
  • Pixlr
    Browser-based image editing.
  • Canva
    Design templates and quick visual production.
  • Kapwing
    Online video editing and social media video tools.
  • Remove.bg
    Background removal for images.
  • Unscreen
    Background removal for video clips.
  • Pexels
    Free stock photography and video.
  • Pixabay
    Free images, video, music, and sound effects.

Writing and Language

  • LanguageTool
    Grammar and style checking with support for multiple languages.
  • DeepL
    Translation that often reads better than the older machine translation tools.
  • WordHippo
    Synonyms, rhymes, definitions, translations, and word forms.
  • OneLook
    Dictionary and reverse dictionary search.
  • Thesaurus.com
    The old standby when the word is almost right but not quite.
  • Reverso Context
    Translation examples in context.
  • Hemingway Editor
    A blunt readability checker.

Maps, Geography and History

Data and Statistics

  • FRED
    Economic data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
  • Data.gov
    The U.S. government’s open data portal.
  • Census Bureau Data
    Demographic and economic data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
  • Gapminder
    Data visualizations that help explain global development.
  • Kaggle
    Datasets, notebooks, and machine learning competitions.

Personal Finance and Shopping

Health and Science

  • PubMed
    Biomedical and life sciences research.
  • Cochrane Library
    Systematic reviews and evidence summaries.
  • Mayo Clinic
    Plain-language health information.
  • MedlinePlus
    Health information from the National Library of Medicine.
  • Examine.com
    Evidence summaries for nutrition and supplements.
  • NIH
    Research and health information from the National Institutes of Health.

Travel

  • Rome2Rio
    Compare routes across planes, trains, buses, ferries, and cars.
  • Seat61
    Train travel advice with a level of detail that feels almost heroic.
  • Atlas Obscura
    Hidden places, strange landmarks, and offbeat history.
  • Wikivoyage
    A free travel guide written in wiki form.
  • Numbeo
    Cost of living and quality-of-life comparisons.
  • FlightAware
    Flight tracking and aviation information.
  • SkyVector
    Aeronautical charts and flight planning tools.

Teaching and Instruction

Geeky Hidden Gems

If I had to start with only a dozen, I would pick Internet Archive, Our World in Data, FRED, Atlas Obscura, Wayback Machine, DevDocs, Roadmap.sh, OpenStax, LibreTexts, NotebookLM, Radio Garden, and Old Maps Online.

The useful web is not gone. It is just buried under the louder web.

Posted June 8, 2026, under:
Blog

Show your work, even when it hurts

The sensible thing to say about artificial intelligence is that we should learn how to use it. That is also the boring thing to say, although boring things often have the annoying habit of being true.

The harder thing to say is that we should also keep doing some work the slow way.

I was thinking about this after watching Flux Academy’s video, “The real problem for Web Designers using AI”. The video is aimed at web designers, but the point is bigger than design. The danger is not simply that a client, a manager, or a student can type a prompt and get something that looks finished. The danger is that enough “finished-looking” work can make us forget what skill feels like while it is still being built.

Students are not wrong to use tools. I use tools. I teach tools. A calculator is a tool. A compiler is a tool. Google is a tool. The textbook is a tool, although it is not always loved as one. The problem comes when the tool does the thinking before the student has learned what thinking in that field is supposed to look like.

This is why “show your work” is not just a fussy teacher phrase from the chalk-dust era. It is the thing that reveals whether a person knows where they are, where they are going, and why the next step belongs there. In math, that might mean writing the steps. In programming, it might mean sketching the logic before asking the machine to produce syntax. In writing, it might mean leaving the outline, the bad first paragraph, and the source notes visible long enough to learn from them. In design, it might mean wireframes and rejected versions before the polished mockup shows up to take a bow.

The old-fashioned part matters because friction matters. Not all friction, of course. Some friction is just bad software, bad instructions, or somebody making a class harder because they survived it that way and now feel history should repeat itself. But some friction is useful. Robert and Elizabeth Bjork’s work on “desirable difficulties” is a good reminder that the thing that feels slower in the moment can build more durable learning. Retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, explaining your reasoning: these are not always efficient in the short term, but education is not supposed to be a race to the nearest answer-shaped object.

There is also a reason worked examples and self-explanations keep showing up in learning research. Chi and colleagues’ classic work on self-explanations points to something teachers see all the time: students learn more when they have to explain why a step works, not just copy the step. Atkinson, Renkl and Merrill’s work on fading worked-out steps gets at the same neighborhood. First we show the road. Then we remove a few signs. Eventually the student has to drive.

That is the part AI complicates. It can produce the road, the signs, the car, the soundtrack, and a confident explanation of why the trip was necessary. Sometimes it is right. Sometimes it is almost right in the most dangerous way. Either way, the student who never had to struggle with the map may not know the difference.

So yes, students need to show their work. They need notebooks, sketches, drafts, commit messages, pseudocode, margin notes, attempts that fail for specific reasons, and revisions that show what changed. They need to practice doing things the old-fashioned way long enough to know what the machine is doing when it helps and what it is hiding when it cheats them out of the learning.

But instructors have to endure the pain too.

That may be the more uncomfortable part. It is one thing to tell students not to outsource the struggle. It is another thing to design a class where the struggle is visible, useful, and graded without turning the instructor into a paperwork-processing machine. If students have to show process, instructors have to look at process. If students have to revise, instructors have to make room for revision. If students have to explain where an AI answer helped or failed, instructors have to read those explanations and resist the lazy comfort of grading only the shiny final product.

That means our assignments need to change. Not because every assignment must become an anti-cheating fortress, but because the finished artifact is now too cheap a signal. A polished answer may tell us less than a messy trail. The trail is where judgment appears.

This is not new. The idea of cognitive apprenticeship has been around for decades: experts should model the work, make their thinking visible, coach students through practice, and gradually remove support. That sounds old-fashioned because it is old-fashioned. It also sounds like teaching.

The twist is that instructors need to show their work as well. We should let students see how we approach a problem before it becomes a rubric item. We should solve something live and make a few mistakes where they can see them. We should talk through why an AI-generated answer is plausible but weak, or efficient but shallow, or technically correct but useless for the actual audience. We should be honest that this takes time and that time is the thing everyone is trying to save.

The Flux Academy video argues, in effect, that creative people still matter when they protect the part of the work that requires taste, judgment, and expertise. I would add that students do not get those qualities by receiving only completed answers. They get them by wrestling with process until the process starts to become their own.

And instructors do not get to skip that part either. We have to build the kind of classes where the work is visible enough to teach from, painful enough to matter, and humane enough that students understand the pain is not the point.

The point is learning.

Posted May 27, 2026, under:
Blog

50 Best Websites

Every so often I fall into one of those internet rabbit holes that reminds me the web still has some life in it. Beneath the algorithm sludge and the same five giant platforms, there are still strange little wonders, useful tools and deeply obsessive projects made by people who clearly care about what they are building.

This is my own list of 50 websites worth visiting in that spirit. Some are practical, some are beautiful, and some are gloriously unnecessary. A few have been around forever. A few feel like they should have been impossible to make in the first place.

Places to Wander

  1. Radio Garden
    Spin the globe and drop into live radio stations almost anywhere on Earth.

  2. Window Swap
    Travel by way of other people’s windows, one quiet view at a time.

  3. Atlas Obscura
    A catalog of hidden places, odd histories, and unusual landmarks.

  4. MapCrunch
    Jump to a random Street View location and see where the internet lands you.

  5. GeoGuessr
    A geography game that turns visual clues into global detective work.

Learning and Ideas

  1. Our World in Data
    Serious data, clear charts, and global context without the usual clutter.

  2. The Pudding
    Visual essays that make statistics and culture feel unexpectedly vivid.

  3. Ncase
    Interactive explanations that teach through play instead of lecture.

  4. Wait But Why
    Longform essays that mix humor, diagrams, and ambitious curiosity.

  5. Open Library
    A massive attempt to build a web page for every book ever published.

Tools That Feel Like Magic

  1. Photopea
    A surprisingly capable image editor that runs right in the browser.

  2. Excalidraw
    A fast, sketch-style whiteboard for diagrams, plans, and rough ideas.

  3. Remove.bg
    Upload a photo and the background disappears with almost suspicious ease.

  4. TinyWow
    A grab bag of useful file tools for PDFs, images, video, and more.

  5. ILovePDF
    Simple browser-based PDF tools for merging, splitting, compressing, and converting.

Toys and Small Delights

  1. The Useless Web
    One button, one random site, and a decent chance of mild nonsense.

  2. Pointer Pointer
    Finds a photo of someone pointing exactly where your cursor happens to be.

  3. Cat Bounce
    Digital cats, gravity, and absolutely no larger purpose.

  4. Staggering Beauty
    A tiny internet oddity that rewards reckless mouse movement.

  5. Bored Button
    A launcher for games, distractions, and time you were not planning to lose.

Sound, Atmosphere and Focus

  1. A Soft Murmur
    Mix rain, thunder, wind, and cafe noise into a custom audio backdrop.

  2. Noisli
    Background sounds and focus tools for reading, writing, or grading.

  3. myNoise
    Deeply customizable soundscapes with a level of control that borders on obsessive.

  4. Radiooooo
    Pick a country and decade, then listen to music like a time traveler.

  5. Earth.fm
    Nature sound recordings from around the world, minus the wellness cliches.

Maps, Time and the Physical World

  1. FlightRadar24
    Watch commercial air traffic in real time and realize how crowded the sky is.

  2. MarineTraffic
    The same idea, but for ships, ports, and global trade routes.

  3. Time.is
    A remarkably precise clock that also reminds you how imprecise most clocks are.

  4. Light Pollution Map
    Find the dark skies near you or confirm that your city is glowing too much.

  5. Zoom Earth
    Live weather, satellite imagery, and storm tracking in one slick interface.

For Curious Minds

  1. NASA Eyes
    Explore missions, planets, and spacecraft with a sci-fi control-room feel.

  2. Wolfram Alpha
    A computational engine that is still one of the most interesting corners of the web.

  3. Internet Archive
    Books, films, audio, software, and the broader memory of the internet.

  4. Wayback Machine
    A time machine for websites, complete with old designs and dead pages.

  5. Smithsonian Open Access
    Millions of images and artifacts released for public use and exploration.

Useful for Everyday Internet Life

  1. Have I Been Pwned
    Check whether your email address has shown up in known data breaches.

  2. JustWatch
    Search a movie or show and find out where it is actually streaming.

  3. CamelCamelCamel
    Price history tracking that helps you tell a sale from marketing theater.

  4. AlternativeTo
    A practical way to find software replacements when your favorite app disappoints you.

  5. Down For Everyone Or Just Me
    A tiny utility for deciding whether the problem is the site or your connection.

Creative and Visual

  1. This Is Sand
    A meditative digital art toy built around the simple act of pouring sand.

  2. WeaveSilk
    Draw symmetrical glowing art that looks better than it has any right to.

  3. Canva Color Wheel
    A clean, approachable tool for building better color palettes.

  4. Coolors
    Generate color schemes fast when your design instincts need a jump start.

  5. Unsplash
    A huge library of high-quality photography for projects, mockups, and inspiration.

Games, Experiments and Beautiful Weirdness

  1. Neal.fun
    One of the best collections of playful web experiments online.

  2. Quick, Draw!
    A game that turns your terrible sketches into AI training data.

  3. Little Alchemy 2
    Start with basics, combine everything, and somehow lose an hour.

  4. A Dark Room
    A minimalist browser game that does a lot with very little.

  5. The Million Dollar Homepage
    A preserved relic from an earlier, scrappier era of the web.

The best parts of the internet were never really about scale. They were about curiosity, utility, surprise and the feeling that somebody made a thing simply because it was worth making.

That part of the web still exists. You just have to go looking for it.

Posted April 4, 2026, under:
Blog

Can Gmail survive the cyberattacks era?

Email has had advantages, but its vulnerability means we may have to look for another tool

By Francisco Rodríguez

Lucky are the young ones, they’ve always had Google. Or at least something like it. Or better yet, something that actually works. Don’t get me wrong, there is much that the company produces that works well enough to use.

This past April Fools’ Day marked the 20th anniversary of Gmail, which launched in 2004 and was thought of as a prank by some internet users. At first use, it seemed like a database-writing helper piece of software. You could set an email status to “read” or “unread” and add labels to flag where your messages came from, and maybe where they were going. Initially, I thought for sure there would be a massive documentation file, a long HTML-formatted tome that rivaled lengthy entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. There were directions, yes, but Google simply invited you to use the software and try it on for size.

Over the past couple of decades, Gmail’s spam filter has defended me from some aspects of doom. Perusing the spam folder makes for some (somewhat) amusing reading. There are offers of outrageous fortune in return for a small investment to cover shipping and handling of important documents. These are supposedly left by a long-lost relative who entrusted a considerable sum of euros to a well-known investment firm in the old country. Then there are the not-so-thin-veiled threats from anonymous crusaders claiming to see my every online move. They threaten to have enough proof to ruin my family’s reputation if I don’t cough up $400 in the cybercoin of the day.

The recent ransomware attack on MGM Resorts that crippled their operations, shutting down everything from slot machines to digital room keys, illustrates the risks of relying solely on email for communication. Hackers were allegedly able to social engineer an MGM employee over the phone to gain access and deploy their malware. This incident highlights how email, while ubiquitous, lacks the end-to-end encryption and security features needed to protect sensitive conversations.

For the average person, the MGM breach is a wake-up call that alternatives to email are sorely needed. Secure messaging apps like Signal, with its open-source encryption, or even Telegram and Viber with their partial protections, offer a safer channel to connect with friends, family and colleagues digitally. While not bulletproof, these apps make it substantially harder for bad actors to eavesdrop on chats or use social engineering to compromise an entire organization’s communications. In an era of escalating cyber threats, switching to a secure messenger should be a priority.

Ransomware attacks have hit The Dallas area particularly hard in recent months. In April 2023, the city of Dallas itself fell victim to a Royal ransomware attack that exposed the personal data of over 30,000 people, mostly city employees and their families. The city has already allocated $8.5 million to recover from the incident. Just a few months later in October, Dallas County disclosed it was investigating another “cybersecurity incident” that forced them to take systems offline. With major employers like American Airlines and Southwest Airlines also suffering data breaches this year, it’s clear the North Texas region is a prime target for cybercriminals.

I frankly don’t recall what I used before Gmail. I know I must have had a Hotmail account (not Microsoft Hotmail, they hadn’t purchased the outfit yet) and definitely not AOL Mail (I probably had one of those but only so I could use AOL Instant Messenger). I may have been tied to a local-client solution like Eudora or some software like that. Actually no, I probably picked up the phone and called whoever I wanted to at any time I felt like and looked forward to not hearing an answering machine, but rather welcomed hearing an annoyed “hello” from whoever I called.

For all its faults, email has been a remarkably resilient tool. It’s survived the rise of social media, do-all apps and a countless list of challengers. It’s likely that whatever successor will need to adapt to, rather than wholly replace the existing email system. Then again, maybe the youngs have it right and the next, great TikTok replacement tool will at least bring a short respite to our online communication angst.

Francisco Rodríguez is a Computer Information Technology Faculty at a local college and a former Dallas Morning News and Al Día journalist

DMN Opinion

Posted April 16, 2024, under:
Column

Origins of Paco

I asked the OpenAI ChatGPT what is the origin of the nickname “Paco,” Thus it spake:

“The origin of the nickname Paco is not clear, but it is often considered a short form of the Spanish name Francisco. Francisco is a common Spanish name that is derived from the Latin name Franciscus, which means “Frenchman” or “free man.” The nickname Paco can also be used as a diminutive form of other Spanish names that begin with “Pac,” such as Pacho, Pacolet, or Pacorro. In some cases, Paco may also be used as a nickname for someone with the surname Paco or Pacora.”

Posted December 7, 2022, under:
Meta