Best new learning, font and command-line resources: 27 October

On 27 October, thirty free tools and websites joined the directory, along with ten open-source projects from GitHub. I've grouped them into notes, focus and wellbeing, finding things on the web, fonts and design, learning and research, writing and words, handy browser utilities, and open-source tools you run yourself. Features and pricing change, so check each tool's own page before you rely on it.

Notes, focus and wellbeing

Notejoy keeps notes in notebooks and shared team libraries, with real-time editing, a web clipper and integrations with Google Drive, Slack and Trello. The free plan stops at 5 notebooks, 3 team libraries and 100MB of storage, and offline access needs a paid plan. Penzu is an online journal with unlimited free entries, double password protection and apps for iOS and Android; custom covers, reminders and extra encryption options sit behind Penzu Pro.

Focus To-Do pairs a Pomodoro timer with a task list, so you can set a time for each task and see reports of where your time went. It syncs across devices, and some features need the paid Premium upgrade. Finch gives you a small bird that grows as you complete self-care goals, mood check-ins and breathing exercises. The core app is free with no ads, and Finch Plus adds extra content. Smiling Mind is an Australian not-for-profit meditation app with guided sessions for adults, families and children, completely free with no subscription, though its library is smaller than paid apps.

Savvy Time shows live local times for the cities you choose and converts between time zones, which helps when picking a meeting slot across countries. It's free with ads and doesn't connect to your calendar.

Finding things on the web

Curlie is a large volunteer-edited directory of websites that continues the Open Directory Project, free to browse in many languages, though some listings are out of date. ooh.directory collects personal and independent blogs by category, with RSS feeds for new additions. Marginalia Search is an open-source search engine that favours personal sites and non-commercial pages over big brands; it isn't built for everyday queries and its index is smaller than Google's. Free Public APIs lists hundreds of free APIs and checks every endpoint daily to score latency, error rate and reliability.

Fonts and design

1001 Fonts has more than 60,000 free fonts with a filter for commercial use, though quality varies a lot. Fontesk is a smaller curated collection that clearly marks whether each font is free for commercial or personal use only. Collletttivo is an Italian type collective that releases its typefaces, such as Ronzino and Apfel Grotezk, as open-source fonts. As always, check each font's licence before you use it in a project. CSS Grid Generator, created by Sarah Drasner, lets you drag out grid areas and copy the ready-made CSS and HTML. It covers basic layouts and doesn't save projects.

Learning and research

Saylor University, run by a US non-profit, offers more than 160 free self-paced courses in business, computer science, English, science and maths, mostly as text-based materials. Project Euler has hundreds of maths problems that need a little code to solve, and it gets very hard quickly. Advent of Code is a December calendar of two-part programming puzzles; past events stay online, so you can practise any time of year. PhET runs free research-based science and maths simulations in the browser, aimed mainly at school level.

Brainscape makes flashcards with confidence-based spaced repetition. The free plan covers unlimited cards of your own and AI-generated flashcards, while certified decks and images in cards need Pro. Zenodo, built by CERN, gives papers, datasets, software and slides a citable DOI, with up to 50GB per record. Records are public by design, so only upload what you're happy to share. Google Ngram Viewer charts how often words or phrases appear in millions of digitised books from 1500 onwards; it only covers published books, so read the results with care.

Writing and words

Purdue OWL, Purdue University's Online Writing Lab, has free guides on grammar, academic writing and APA, MLA and Chicago citations. Scribbr Citation Generator builds references from a title, URL, DOI or ISBN with no sign-up, but it promotes Scribbr's paid services and you should always double-check the results. RhymeZone finds rhymes, near rhymes, synonyms and related words. Wiktionary is the free, ad-free Wikimedia dictionary with definitions, pronunciations, word origins and translations, though quality varies by language. Linguee, from the team behind DeepL, shows real translations from the web so you can see how a phrase is used in context; it isn't a full text translator.

Handy browser utilities

WebcamTests checks your camera's resolution and frame rate in the browser before a call, and Keyboard Tester lights up an on-screen keyboard as you press keys to spot dead or sticky ones. Neither can fix driver problems. Rentry publishes Markdown as a clean page with a short link and no account, but pages are public to anyone with the link and you need to keep your edit code safe. ProtectedText encrypts notes in your browser behind a password you choose, with no ads or sign-up. Lost passwords can't be recovered, so store yours carefully.

Open-source tools to run yourself

Google Workspace MCP is a server that lets AI assistants such as Claude read and send Gmail, manage Calendar, edit Docs, Sheets and Slides, and search Drive. It needs a Google Cloud OAuth setup and suits people comfortable with config files. Think carefully before giving any AI assistant access to your email and documents. Planify is a Todoist-style task manager for Linux that syncs with Todoist or Nextcloud, and Itsycal puts a small calendar with your upcoming events in the Mac menu bar.

Several of these live in the terminal. Timewarrior tracks time with tagged timers and summaries in local plain-text files. croc sends files between computers with end-to-end encryption and a code phrase, but both people need it installed. fzf filters files, command history and Git branches as you type. Pandoc converts documents between Markdown, Word, HTML, LaTeX, PDF and EPUB, and PDF output needs LaTeX installed. D2 turns a few lines of text into diagrams, though some layout engines are paid add-ons.

SingleFile is a browser extension that saves a complete web page into one HTML file for an offline archive; saved files can be large and some dynamic pages don't save perfectly. Vibe transcribes audio and video on your own computer using Whisper, with no cloud upload, but bigger models need a capable machine and accuracy depends on audio quality.

All of these are waiting in the full Best Productivity Resources directory, along with every other tool and guide. Filter by category, pricing and platform to find your fit.