Best new privacy, typography and open-source resources: 29 October

On 29 October, thirty free tools and websites joined the directory, along with ten open-source projects from GitHub. I've grouped them into lists and scheduling, small utilities, free directories and privacy helpers, design and typography, learning, and open-source tools you run yourself. Features and pricing change, so check each tool's own page before you rely on it.

Lists, scheduling and focus

Remember The Milk lets you add tasks in plain language, with due dates, tags and priorities picked up as you type, and sorts them into lists and smart lists. The free plan syncs across web and mobile, while subtasks and phone reminders need Pro at $49.99 a year. Checkvist turns tasks and notes into nested lists you can drive almost entirely from the keyboard. Its free plan includes unlimited lists and sharing, and repeating tasks and reminders need PRO at $39 a year. Dynalist, from the team behind Obsidian, organises everything as collapsible bullet points with links, tags and dates. The free version gives you unlimited items, and attachments and backups need Pro; note that updates have slowed in recent years.

LettuceMeet lets a group paint their free times on a shared grid and shows the best overlap. It is free, needs no account to respond, and can read busy times from Google Calendar, though it has no booking pages or reminders. Kill the Newsletter gives you an email address and a matching feed, so newsletters land in your feed reader instead of your inbox; some publishers block its addresses. Unhook is a free extension that switches off YouTube's home feed, related videos, comments, Shorts and autoplay, each with its own toggle, on desktop browsers.

Markup Hero lets you annotate screenshots, images and PDFs with arrows, text, highlights and blur, then share a link. The free plan covers 25 markups, and free edits lock after 24 hours. Adobe Enhance Speech cleans background noise and echo from voice recordings in the browser. It needs an Adobe account, and free use has daily limits.

Small utilities

FilePizza sends a file straight from your browser to someone else's, so it is never stored on a server in between. It is free and open source, but your tab must stay open and both people need to be online. Tables Generator turns pasted or typed data into clean table code for LaTeX, Markdown, HTML and more, free in the browser with ads. JSONPlaceholder gives developers ready-made fake endpoints for testing and tutorials; changes are faked and not saved. Online Tone Generator plays tones at any frequency and adds a noise generator, metronome, hearing test and sweep generator. Keep the volume low, and bear in mind browser audio is less precise than lab equipment.

Directories and privacy helpers

Cool Tools, started by Kevin Kelly, recommends one useful tool every weekday, written by real users; some links earn Amazon fees. Wiby searches lightweight, personal and hobbyist websites in the style of the early internet, and the 512KB Club lists fast websites that stay under 512KB. uses.tech collects nearly a thousand pages where people list the hardware and software they use every day, though it leans towards developers.

Three free directories help with privacy and security. ToS;DR grades the terms and privacy policies of websites from A to E with short summary points; not every service is reviewed, and it is not a substitute for legal advice. JustDeleteMe links straight to the account deletion pages of hundreds of websites and rates how easy each one is, though some links go out of date. 2FA Directory shows which websites support two-factor authentication and which methods they offer. Its data is crowdsourced, so confirm on each site before you rely on it.

Design and typography

Lummi offers AI-generated photos, illustrations and 3D images that you can use for personal and commercial projects without attribution, with some tools in Pro. Remember these are AI-generated, not real photos. IRA Design lets you mix hand-drawn characters and objects into your own illustrations, free under the MIT licence. Mockup World gathers free photorealistic PSD mockups, but licences differ per mockup, so check the terms on each one. Dark Mode Design showcases websites that use dark colour schemes well, including some sponsored listings.

For type, Wakamai Fondue and FontDrop both let you drop a font file into the browser to see its glyphs, OpenType features and variable axes without uploading it anywhere, and Wakamai Fondue also generates ready-to-use CSS. Butterick's Practical Typography is a free online book on making documents, websites and presentations look professional.

Learning

Chrome Music Lab from Google turns music concepts into playful browser experiments and is widely used in classrooms. Lichess lets you play chess, solve puzzles and analyse games with no ads or paywalls; it is open source and run by a non-profit. Language Transfer offers free audio courses in Spanish, Greek, Arabic, Italian, German, French, Turkish and more, and Tatoeba holds millions of volunteer-translated example sentences, many with audio. Sentence quality on Tatoeba varies, so treat it as a reference rather than a course.

Open-source tools to run yourself

On the Mac, MeetingBar puts your next calendar event in the menu bar and opens its call link in one click. LinearMouse tunes your mouse and trackpad separately and needs accessibility permission, and Amethyst tiles your windows automatically with keyboard shortcuts. Several projects suit browsers and reading: SponsorBlock skips sponsor reads and filler in YouTube videos that the community has marked, uBlock Origin blocks ads and trackers (Chrome gets the lighter uBO Lite version), and Koodo Reader opens EPUB, PDF and MOBI books and syncs through your own cloud storage.

For people comfortable with code, Slidev turns a Markdown file into slides and needs Node.js. Yazi is a fast file manager in the terminal, fd finds files by name much faster than the classic find command, and Vale checks your writing for style and consistency, though it takes some configuration.

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.