Useful Corners of the Web

Detailed walking routes, maps and local landscape information.

Ancient stones, sacred sites and landscape archaeology in Cornwall.

Protecting and interpreting important historic sites across Cornwall.

Research, fieldwork, publications and events covering Cornwall and Scilly.

An online English–Cornish and Cornish–English dictionary.

A searchable corpus and reference resource for the Cornish language.

Cornwall's archive centre, with extensive collections of documents, photographs, maps and records relating to Cornish history.

A large volunteer-built collection of Cornish parish, family-history and genealogical records.

A straightforward converter and locator for UK grid references.

Compare historic Ordnance Survey mapping directly with modern maps and aerial imagery.

Historical maps from collections around the world. A particularly effective way to lose an afternoon.

Interactive terrain and elevation mapping, with point elevations and a particularly handy local view centred on Boscastle.

Online mapping of recorded public rights of way across Cornwall.

DEFRA's map of environmental designations, protected sites, habitats and other geographic datasets.

Interactive British Geological Survey mapping showing bedrock and superficial geology across Great Britain.

Millions of georeferenced photographs covering Britain and Ireland.

A database and community site devoted to UK trig pillars and survey points. Also see the interactive trig pillar map.

Records and photographs of Ordnance Survey bench marks across Britain.

My growing photographic archive of places, structures, memorials, inscriptions, curiosities and other things worth noticing, with searchable records and an interactive map.

The official register of listed buildings, scheduled monuments and other protected heritage.

A convenient searchable guide to listed buildings throughout Britain, with maps, photographs and location information.

Search national and local historic-environment records in one place.

A vast archive of archaeological datasets, reports and publications.

A long-running community database of prehistoric, ancient and historic sites, with maps, photographs, field reports and visitor information.

Digitised primary and secondary sources for British and Irish history.

Historic maps, census information, gazetteers and descriptions of places across Britain.

Historic aerial photographs of Britain, many from the first half of the twentieth century.

A national record of UK war memorials, including many user-supplied photographs and updates.

Information and support relating to historic church buildings across the UK.

A crowd-sourced guide to visiting Church of England and Church in Wales churches, with access information, photographs and visitor notes. I contributed extensively during its early years.

Richly observed guides to churches in Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex and the City of London, combining photographs, architecture, local history and the character of each visit.

A searchable photographic record of Romanesque sculpture, with detailed descriptions, church histories and architectural context.

Everything you never realised you needed to know about church bells.

A remarkably detailed database of pipe organs in Britain, including specifications, histories and locations.

Research and resources devoted to church monuments, memorial sculpture and funerary art.

A searchable photographic record of grave monuments and their inscriptions, including names, dates and family relationships.

A searchable archive of historic graffiti, masons' marks, ritual protection marks and other centuries-old inscriptions hidden on buildings.

Links to regional surveys and archives recording medieval and historic graffiti in churches and other buildings around Britain.

Research, archives and publications spanning archaeology, churches and local history.

A substantial illustrated reference to heraldic terms, charges, objects and terminology.

A major reference to British and Irish heraldic families, surnames and coats of arms.

A detailed reference to the British peerage and associated genealogy.

The main geocaching platform and map.

Statistics, challenge checkers, maps and assorted tools for geocachers.

A substantial collection of coordinate, projection, cipher and puzzle-solving tools for geocachers.

A very useful map for plotting coordinates, projecting waypoints and working with GPX data.

A worldwide catalogue of interesting places, structures, signs and assorted things worth noticing.

An enormous collection of cipher, encoding, mathematics and puzzle-solving tools.

GCHQ's browser-based toolkit for decoding, encoding, hashing, compression, data conversion and general digital poking-about.

Cryptography learning tools covering classic and modern ciphers.

Cipher identification, code-breaking, word-game, maths and hidden-data tools in one browser-based collection.

A fast automatic solver for simple substitution ciphers and cryptograms.

An old-school collection of classic cipher and encoding tools that has been useful to puzzle-solvers for years.

Whitespace steganography in a browser. Because apparently ordinary text was too obvious.

A brilliantly unsettling fictional town trapped in the 1970s, blending public-information design, bureaucracy, hauntology and very black humour. One of the inspirations behind my fictional institutional archive, the Order of Magnitude Archive.

A personal series of real-world stories from the chemistry laboratory — analytical instruments, troubleshooting, unexpected results and lessons learned at the bench.

Royal Society of Chemistry data, histories, properties and assorted element-related rabbit holes.

Reference data for thousands of chemical compounds, including spectra, thermochemistry and physical properties.

A wonderfully useful collection of NMR, IR, mass and other spectra for organic compounds.

Free, open-source chemistry-aware data visualisation and analysis software from OpenMolecules. Particularly useful for working with compound tables, chemical structures, similarity, clustering, calculated properties and structure–activity relationships.

A useful little tool for exploring first-order NMR multiplet patterns.

Repository for experimental NMR data from biological molecules, including chemical shifts, assignments and related structural information. A useful reference source for biomolecular NMR and comparison of reported data.

Structural biology data, visualisation and molecular tools.

Ephemerides, small-body data and precision Solar System calculations.

Orbital and observational data for minor planets, comets and other small bodies.

Astronomical object database and cross-reference tool. Particularly useful for looking up stars and other objects by catalogue designation and finding their alternative names, coordinates and basic data.

Online astronomical plate solver. Upload an image of a star field and it can identify where in the sky it was taken, returning coordinates, field size, pixel scale and a WCS solution. Very handy when an old astronomical image has survived rather better than its notes.

Remote access to observatory telescopes around the world for astrophotography, photometry and other astronomical observing projects.

Citizen science through visual classification of galaxies.

A conversational AI assistant for research, problem-solving, writing, coding and the occasional four-hour website rabbit hole.

Clear documentation for installing and setting up Linux Mint.

The venerable distribution underneath a considerable chunk of the Linux world.

Search Debian packages, their contents, dependencies and available versions.

Documentation, downloads and support for Ubuntu Linux.

Official Firefox help and troubleshooting documentation.

Detailed reference and guides for HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the wider web platform.

Check HTML and other web documents against the relevant markup specifications.

Browser-support tables for HTML, CSS, JavaScript and related web-platform features.

A quick browser-based editor for testing and tidying small HTML snippets.

A lightweight website crawler and technical site-audit tool.

An interactive regular-expression tester with explanations, highlighting and debugging help.

Finds common bugs, dubious constructs and portability problems in shell scripts.

Paste in a shell command and see its individual parts explained using the relevant manual pages.

Search publicly visible internet hosts, services, certificates and web infrastructure. Useful for checking what a server, IP address or domain appears to expose to the wider internet.

DNS reconnaissance and domain research for discovering DNS records, associated hosts and the externally visible footprint of a domain.

A detailed public check of HTTPS and TLS configuration.

Security and networking tools from Steve Gibson, including ShieldsUP!, DNS Benchmark and a substantial collection of diagnostic utilities.

Check whether an email address has appeared in known data breaches.

A quick check when a website has stopped responding and you would like to know whose problem it is.

Traditional CAPTCHAs block bots. Clawptcha does the opposite — it verifies that your AI agents and automated systems are legitimately non-human.

Current and forecast rainfall, with useful weather layers for seeing what is actually heading your way.

Interactive weather maps with model forecasts for wind, rain, pressure, waves and much more.

Animated weather visualisation with forecast layers for wind, precipitation, temperature and other conditions.

Animated global views of wind, weather, ocean conditions and other environmental data.

Animated recent lightning activity across the UK from the Blitzortung network. A Europe-wide animation is also available.

Lancaster University's geomagnetic activity monitor and aurora alerts for the UK.

Live river, sea, groundwater and rainfall monitoring for England.

Free short-range tidal predictions and tidal curves for hundreds of UK port locations.

Detailed regional forecasts concentrating on the conditions and hazards that matter when outdoors.

UK air-quality measurements, pollution information and daily forecasts.

British Geological Survey information on recent earthquakes in the UK and around the world.

Near-real-time vessel tracking, port activity and ship movements around the world's coasts.

Live aircraft tracking around the world, with routes, flight information and aircraft details.

Clear public guidance for common emergencies, including CPR, choking, burns, bleeding and stroke.

Practical coastal, sea and water-safety advice from the RNLI.

A quick way to identify and share a precise location, especially where an ordinary street address is unhelpful.

UK pre-hospital clinical guidance and medicines information for ambulance clinicians and other trained users.

A specialist clinical app for burn assessment and fluid-resuscitation calculations.

The UK clinical toxicology database. Access is restricted to eligible healthcare and related professional users.

A searchable ADR reference for UN numbers, classifications, labels, tunnel codes and other road-transport information.

Local UK pollen forecasts and alerts. One I use myself when hay-fever season begins plotting against me.

A community-maintained open database of artists, releases, recordings and other music metadata.

A cross-platform music tagger powered by MusicBrainz, with acoustic-fingerprint support.

Open acoustic fingerprints for identifying audio recordings from the sound itself.

A vast library of public-domain and freely available musical scores and recordings.

Open-source music notation software, documentation and related score resources.

A huge collaborative archive of downloadable sound effects, field recordings and other audio.

Technical reference material covering codecs, formats, audio software and digital-audio practice.

Open multimedia formats and technologies including Ogg, Vorbis, Opus and FLAC.

Shows detailed technical and tag information for audio and video files.

The official reference for FFmpeg's command-line multimedia conversion, filtering and processing tools.

Quick browser-based video compression for reducing file sizes without immediately reaching for a local FFmpeg command.

Simple browser tools for converting, resizing and editing GIFs and short video.

A surprisingly capable browser-based image editor for quick adjustments, effects, transparency, edge smoothing and image clean-up.

A personal media-server platform for organising and streaming music, video and other media across devices. I use Plex myself to keep my own media collection available when I am away from home, rather than relying entirely on commercial streaming services. Plexamp is particularly good for accessing and playing a personal music library ⓘ

Books, websites, audio, software and the Wayback Machine.

An open catalogue of books with links to digital copies and borrowing where available.

Millions of digitised books and documents from research-library collections.

Search the full text and metadata of an enormous range of digitised books and periodicals.

A vast library of free ebooks, particularly works whose copyright has expired.

A collaborative library of transcribed source texts and historical documents.

Search library catalogues around the world to find books, editions and nearby holdings.

The open media repository behind Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, containing freely licensed photographs, illustrations, audio and other files.

Search digitised British and Irish newspapers; much full-page access requires a subscription.

The UK's official public record, with searchable notices stretching back centuries.

Searchable transcripts of debates and proceedings in the UK Parliament.