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.

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

“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.”

That didn’t stop me (or two other classmates that were hired that summer to track migrant students in the schools), and we banged out some code using TRS-80 Model IVs and played aroung with a Xenix server that no one knew what to do with.

When it was all said and done I used my paycheck to buy my first home computer, a Commodore 64. Also got to catch a few movies, including “WarGames,” my (generation’s) introduction to hacking and artificial intelligence. The machines used in the film, the phone modems, the graphics, the sounds…

I’d have to watch the film again to make a list of everything we thought we knew back then, as well as everything that turned out to be true. Yeah, that would be fun.

1980? We got cable, and HBO. Before MTV, the Music Breaks provided my first exposure to music videos

1982-83 Tuning the radio away from my parents’ stations

There was this time we got an FM antenna and I heard this song in stereo on the old console:

1984 Summer-school biology, with the Oz.

There’s many an explanation as to why this is a defining moment in my 90s decade, but to be sure it was the boom of the internet, and how listening to an unknown song that hocked a product that I wasn’t going to purchase led to an online search that brought an (almost) immediate response.

I hope I never tire of this tune.

NOTE TO SELF: “… and then all things changed, somehow rearranged” are the lyrics I remember from the early 1980s HBO show “Remember When.” Dick Cavett hosted the series, which took on a topic and explored it for an hour, very much in the same way modern documentaries are done today, taking one topic, then exploring all branches that lead from it. The theme song:

OK, so there was some explanation.

I think it was because it was featured in the TV-Guide channel of whatever cable system I had in the late 80s that kept on playing it over and over again. Welcome to the time machine.