Best new data, learning and remote job resources: 26 October

The directory additions from 26 October were thirty free tools and websites and ten open-source projects from GitHub. This roundup groups them into tasks, focus and notes, data and research, learning and writing, remote work, design resources, everyday utilities, and open-source apps. Features and pricing change, so check each tool's own page before you rely on it.

Tasks, focus and notes

Goblin Tools is a set of single-purpose helpers, mostly built for neurodivergent people, that split a task into steps, estimate how long things take or judge the tone of a message. The website is free with no ads, while the mobile apps cost a small fee, and as with any AI helper its output can be off. StudyStream runs live focus rooms where people study and work on camera together, with timers, tasks and streaks; the free plan gives one hour of focus room time a day and shows ads.

UpNote is a tidy notes app with nested notebooks, hashtags, Markdown shortcuts, offline access and a web clipper. Its free version syncs across devices but is limited to 50 notes, and locks and export need Premium.

Data and research

Datawrapper turns pasted or uploaded data into charts, maps and tables you can embed; the free plan allows unlimited visualisations with attribution, and PDF and SVG export are paid. Flourish builds animated charts, maps, scrollytelling stories and bar chart races from templates, but free projects are published publicly. RAWGraphs maps spreadsheet data to more than 30 chart types in your browser without uploading it, and exports SVG files, though it offers no hosting or embedding.

Our World in Data publishes free research, interactive charts and datasets on health, poverty, energy, climate and education under a Creative Commons licence, so you can reuse them with credit. Gapminder offers free animated charts, Dollar Street photos and fact quizzes for exploring global trends in classrooms and presentations. Litmaps maps how research papers cite each other to support a literature review; the free plan is limited to two maps, and alerts need a paid plan.

Learning and writing

OpenStax, a non-profit at Rice University, publishes free, openly licensed textbooks you can read online or download as PDFs, with low-cost printed copies for those who prefer paper. Codewars offers thousands of coding challenges in more than 50 languages, free with ads. Typing.com teaches keyboarding from beginner lessons to speed practice, free for individuals and schools.

YouGlish plays the exact moment a word or phrase is spoken in YouTube videos, so you can hear natural pronunciation in context. Power Thesaurus suggests synonyms and related words ranked by community votes, though some suggestions are loose matches. WordReference offers free bilingual dictionaries, verb conjugators and forums of native speakers answering questions about tricky phrases.

Remote work

Remote OK lists remote jobs with salary ranges and filters by location and time zone, with a strong tech focus. We Work Remotely has listed remote roles for more than a decade and is free for job seekers, though listings are competitive and entry-level roles are few. Working Nomads collects remote jobs from across the web and emails matching roles, with an optional premium membership. As with any job board, check each employer directly before you share personal details.

Design resources

Noun Project hosts millions of icons you can recolour before downloading, free with credit to the creator or without attribution on Noun Pro. Vecteezy offers vectors, photos, videos and PNGs, many free with attribution, while many top results are Pro-only. DaFont and FontSpace both offer large collections of free fonts; check each font's licence, because many on DaFont are for personal use only, while FontSpace labels which fonts are free for commercial use. WebGradients lets you copy preset colour blends as CSS or download them as images.

Everyday utilities

Convert Case switches text between upper, lower, sentence and title case and counts words and characters. RegExr highlights regular expression matches as you type and explains each part of the pattern. JSONLint validates and reformats JSON and converts it to and from CSV and YAML; avoid pasting sensitive data into any online checker.

Speedtest by Ookla measures download and upload speeds, latency and jitter, and results vary by the server you choose. Online Mic Test shows a live sound wave so you can confirm your microphone works before a meeting, though it cannot fix driver issues. 123apps bundles browser tools for cutting video, trimming audio, recording and editing PDFs, with file size limits on the free account. Calculator Soup offers hundreds of free calculators, many with step-by-step working.

Open-source apps

Tasks.org is a free, open-source to-do app for Android, with recurring tasks, subtasks, location reminders and sync with Google Tasks, CalDAV, DAVx5 or EteSync; there is no iPhone app. Wiki.js is a wiki you run on your own server, with Markdown or visual editing and optional Git sync, and it needs a server and database. Kavita is a home reading server for ebooks, comics, manga and PDFs that you read in any browser; it also needs a server or Docker, and you are responsible for your own backups.

zk and nb are command-line tools for plain-text notes. zk links Markdown notes with templates, tags and backlinks and works with editors such as Neovim and VS Code, while nb also saves bookmarks, to-dos and archived web pages in Git-backed notebooks; on Windows it needs WSL or similar.

KOReader is an ebook reader for e-ink devices such as Kobo, Kindle, PocketBook and reMarkable, and also runs on Android and Linux; installing it on an e-reader takes some steps. Subtitle Edit creates, syncs and translates subtitles and can generate captions with Whisper, mainly on Windows. PDF Arranger merges, splits, rotates and reorders PDF pages offline on Linux and Windows. OCRmyPDF adds a searchable text layer to scanned PDFs in more than 100 languages from the command line, and whisper.cpp runs OpenAI's Whisper speech recognition locally to turn recordings into text, with larger models needing more memory.

You can find all of these, along with every other tool and guide, in the full Best Productivity Resources directory, where you can filter by category, pricing and platform.