You surf the internet all day long but there’s always a particular set of websites you run into. Usually, these are blogs, news sites, and video directories which basically follow the same format and just come with contents of their own domain. So in this vast world of the internet, what websites should you be plundering your precious time in? Here are eight websites with unique appeal or that are just out-and-out handy. 

What Every Browser Knows About You (WEBKAY)

With privacy being one of the most serious issues of the decade, our every move on the internet is being tracked. All of our personal information is being sold for 

targeted advertisement and all of this is happening simply through our browsers. So here’s a simple site, that’ll preview all the information the browser knows about you. It’ll give you your location, sites you are logged into, your system hardware information, and so on. The best thing about this site is that it not only shows you what it knows but also suggests how you can hide that information. 

Music-Map

MusicMap is a simple site where you can find other artists you may like if you listen to a certain musician. The search results are based on the concept that if people like certain artists then they are likely to like similar but different artists. When you search for the artist, you’d get a scattered search result. If two artists are close together, then the probability of liking that artist is higher, the further away two artists are the more iffy the chances of you liking them.

Explore Everest by Discovery

Bored of couch surfing all day? How about a quick tour of Mount Everest? Explore Everest is an intuitive website which takes you on a journey to the top of Mt Everest. You get an interactive audio experience of winds howling, a side altitude meter and 

a story line to keep you entertained throughout the journey. It doesn’t have Google’s 360 views which would have made it more fun to look around but still, it’s a great experience.

Pink Trombone

This one is a really interesting and useful website if you are a health student. This website helps you with speech synthesis. The website will show you how your mouth is manipulated while producing different sounds. It lets you control your oral cavity, throat, and tongue to produce sound and can be a great way to pass time if you have some minutes to kill. Here’s a basic walkthrough the site: Move the body of the tongue to shape vowels. Touch the oral cavity to narrow it, for fricative consonants. Touch above the oral cavity to close it, for stop consonants Touch the nasal cavity to open the velum and let sound flow through the nose.

Photoskop

Photoskop is a perfect interactive tool for individuals who are interested in photography. This site simulates the working of a DSLR and lets you control different aspects of it, teaching you how it affects the picture you’re taking. You’ll also be able to control the scene (based on lighting), equipment and setup. There’s also a catalog to adopt depending on what kind of photography you’d want to learn. Getting a DSLR sure is expensive, so you might just learn the basic skills with this simulation and apply your newly acquired knowledge in the real world. Since most of the browsers have already killed flash, this one needs Adobe Flash to run the simulation, so make sure to install it beforehand.

The Basetrip

If you are someone who travels a lot then getting all the information of that country and its cities at hand is very useful. This is where The Basetrip comes into the picture. This site will give you all the necessary information from 650 cities of 230 countries. The site includes visa and embassy information, accommodation and flight prices, and apps to book one, currencies, costs of living, internet speeds, mobile data prices (with carriers), electricity sockets, general rules and regulations and more. No doubt a handy tool for your next vacation; or for just plain day dreaming!

Quick, Draw!

Quick Draw is a website by Google where you can draw doodles to see if the Google’s Neural Network can identify it. This site gives you an item for doodling and based on your drawing, the site passes various comments. It’s a fun website to kill your time with. Your doodle is saved on the Google’s database which helps to train its Neural Network to better identify objects. Also, all of this data is open sourced, so if you’re a developer you can easily use this dataset in your project.

Readism

This website is going to be handy for those who love reading. This is a simple site that tells you how much average time it would take to read a certain book. This has a straightforward UI where you have to enter the Name and Author of the book and it’ll deliver its reading time. Making an account on the site will give an added benefit of 

personalised reading time. First, it’ll give you few chunks of paragraphs to read and based on the time you take, it’ll predict the reading time of all the books you search for.

As an icing on the cake, Readism also comes with its own Chrome Extension which can tell you how long a certain web article will take to read.