Top 5 lists: Tech
13 lists
Top 5 Free Tools for Side Projects
Ship faster without spending money.
1–3: Vercel · Supabase · Resend
Top 5 Unglamorous Programs Quietly Holding Civilization Together
No keynotes, no logos on hoodies, just software so essential that half the internet would fall over if it vanished tomorrow.
1–3: curl — Daniel Stenberg · SQLite — D. Richard Hipp · FFmpeg
Top 5 Calculators That Outlived Their Owners' Math Classes
The button-covered bricks people kept long after their last exam and still won't throw away.
1–3: TI-83 Plus — Texas Instruments · HP-12C — Hewlett-Packard · TI-89 Titanium — Texas Instruments
Top 5 Error Messages That Became Accidental Pop Culture
Screens that ruined someone's day and somehow ended up on T-shirts, in memes, and in the internet's shared vocabulary.
1–3: Twitter's Fail Whale — Yiying Lu · Chrome's No Internet Dinosaur — Google · The Blue Screen of Death — Microsoft Windows
Top 5 Apps That Do One Thing and Never Ask for More
No subscriptions, no AI assistant, no onboarding tour. Just small tools that do one job perfectly and then leave you alone.
1–3: Everything — voidtools · Rectangle — Ryan Hanson · The Unarchiver — MacPaw
Top 5 Tech Products Killed Off While People Were Still Using Them
Discontinued, shut down or bought out, and somehow still missed more than half of what replaced them.
1–3: Google Reader — Google · Pebble Time — Pebble · Vine — Twitter
Top 5 Startup Sounds Still Living Rent-Free in Your Head
The few seconds of audio that meant the machine was waking up, and that your brain refuses to forget.
1–3: Mac Startup Chime — Apple · Windows 95 Startup Sound — Brian Eno · PlayStation Boot Screen — Sony
Top 5 Wired Headphones Still Worth Untangling
No batteries, no pairing, no firmware updates. These cables are worth the occasional knot.
1–3: MDR-7506 — Sony · Porta Pro — Koss · HD 600 — Sennheiser
Top 5 Old Phones People Still Get Nostalgic About
The phones that had real buttons and real personality, and that people still bring up at dinner parties.
1–3: Nokia 3310 · Motorola RAZR V3 · T-Mobile Sidekick
Top 5 Browser Extensions That Quietly Fix the Internet
The small add-ons that make the modern web less annoying, without asking for attention or a monthly fee.
1–3: uBlock Origin · Bitwarden · SponsorBlock
Top 5 Keyboard Shortcuts That Make Coworkers Think You're a Wizard
Small key combos that save real minutes and quietly impress anyone watching over your shoulder.
1–3: Ctrl+Shift+T — Reopen Closed Tab · Win+V — Windows Clipboard History · Cmd+Shift+4 — macOS Area Screenshot
Top 5 Websites That Still Feel Like the Good Old Internet
Corners of the web where nothing autoplays and nobody's chasing your engagement. They're just strange, generous and fun to explore.
1–3: Radio Garden · Neal.fun — Neal Agarwal · Wikipedia
Top 5 Gadgets That Earn Their Spot in a Carry-On
Bag space is limited, so everything in it has to do real work at the gate, on the plane or in a hotel with one outlet.
1–3: Kindle Paperwhite — Amazon · Sony WF-1000XM5 · Apple AirTag