Best new screen capture, design and learning resources: 30 October

On 30 October, thirty-two free and freemium tools and websites joined the directory, along with ten open-source projects from GitHub. I've grouped them into thinking and screen capture, free directories, design, images and music, developer utilities, learning, and open-source tools you run yourself. Features and pricing change, so check each tool's own page before you rely on it.

Thinking, capturing and sharing

Untools explains proven mental models such as second-order thinking, the Eisenhower matrix, the Ishikawa diagram and the Cynefin framework in short, plain-language pages, each showing when and how to use it. It is free to read with no account, though the collection is small and has no interactive worksheets.

Three tools help you capture and mark up your screen. Jumpshare records your screen, takes screenshots and short GIFs, and uploads them straight to a shareable link. The free Basic plan includes 25 uploads and five-minute recordings, while Plus starts at $12 a user per month. Lightshot lets you select part of your desktop, add arrows, text and highlights, then save, copy or upload it, free on Windows and macOS with Chrome and Firefox extensions. Bear in mind that uploaded Lightshot screenshots are public to anyone with the link. Annotely adds arrows, numbered pins, labels, blur and spot zoom to any image in the browser, and can build multi-slide how-to guides, free and with no sign-up.

Auphonic balances levels, reduces noise and hum, normalises loudness and can transcribe your audio in a single upload. The free plan gives you two hours of processed audio a month, and heavier users need paid credits. Excalidraw Libraries collects hundreds of free community packs, from system design icons to wireframe kits and hand-drawn arrows, that open straight inside Excalidraw; quality varies between packs.

Free directories and the small web

What Agents Can Do collects more than 850 real AI agent use cases from X, Reddit and Hacker News, each with a source link, a copy-paste prompt, an evidence grade and known pitfalls. You can browse by outcome across agents like Claude Code, n8n and Grok Bot. It is free and updated daily, though it includes sponsored cards and results depend on the agent and plan you use.

If you miss the personal side of the internet, Search My Site indexes only approved personal sites and blogs, free to search with no adverts, with a paid full listing for site owners at £12 a year. Kagi Small Web shows a random recent post from thousands of human-written personal sites, with topic filters and no Kagi account needed. 1MB Club lists sites whose pages load in under one megabyte, colour-coded by size, though some links go stale over time.

Passkeys Directory, built by 1Password, tracks which sites let you sign in with passkeys instead of passwords and links to each service's setup guide. Coverage depends on community submissions, so confirm on the site itself. Cheatography hosts more than 6,000 free cheat sheets for programming languages, apps, shortcuts and hobbies as downloadable PDFs, supported by ads, with quality that varies by author.

Design, images and music

Google Arts & Culture brings together high-resolution artworks, museum tours and historic photos from thousands of partner institutions, free on the web and in mobile apps. Its images are for viewing, not free reuse. Wellcome Collection, a free museum and library in London, puts thousands of digitised pictures, manuscripts and books about health and human experience online, and much of it can be downloaded under free licences; check the usage terms on each item.

For making things, Patternico turns icons, emojis or your own images into a seamless repeating tile and exports it as a free PNG. Gradient Magic collects hundreds of CSS gradients you can copy into a project with one click. AutoDraw guesses what you are sketching and offers tidy artist-drawn versions, free in the browser and on phones and tablets. Pixelied is a drag-and-drop editor with 200+ free templates, stock images and 2GB of storage on its free plan, while background removal, AI credits and resizing need Pro at $47 a year. Bigjpg enlarges illustrations and photos with a neural network; the free plan handles 20 images a month at up to 4x on a slower shared server, and paid plans raise the limit to 16x.

ccMixter has shared Creative Commons music since 2004, with remixes, a cappellas, samples and instrumentals for videos, podcasts and games. Each track shows its licence, so credit the artist and check whether commercial use is allowed.

Developer utilities

UIAble, from CodedThemes, is a UI system built on shadcn/ui with React, Next.js, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS. The Community edition is free and MIT-licensed, while pro blocks, templates and Figma files need a one-time paid licence, and the Standard licence does not allow SaaS end products.

Several small tools help with testing. Random User Generator returns realistic placeholder people in JSON, CSV, YAML or XML with no API key. httpbin echoes back whatever you send, so you can test headers, methods, redirects and status codes, and it runs locally with Docker. Kroki gives you one API for diagram languages like PlantUML, Mermaid, GraphViz and D2, returning SVG or PNG, and can be self-hosted. Lipsum generates Lorem Ipsum by paragraphs, words, bytes or lists. IPinfo shows the location and network behind any IP address, with a free Lite tier for developers at country level and paid plans from $26 a month for city-level detail. Online OCR converts JPG, PNG, GIF and PDF scans into Word, Excel or plain text, with guests limited to five files an hour of up to 15MB each.

Learning

Paul's Online Notes, written by Paul Dawkins at Lamar University, covers algebra, calculus and differential equations with notes, worked examples and practice problems with full solutions, free online or as PDFs. Math is Fun explains maths in simple language with interactive diagrams, puzzles and printable worksheets; it is aimed at children, supported by ads and light on exam-style practice.

Teachable Machine from Google lets you train a simple model to recognise images, sounds or poses with no code and export it for TensorFlow.js, though it is not meant for production at scale. Open Yale Courses shares complete recorded Yale lectures with transcripts and problem sets under a Creative Commons licence, with no credit or certificates. Teach Yourself Computer Science lays out nine core subjects for software engineers, each with a recommended book and lecture series; some of the books cost money.

Open-source tools to run yourself

In the terminal, bat shows file contents with syntax highlighting, line numbers and Git markers, Glow renders Markdown neatly for reading, and superfile is a multi-panel file manager that works best with a Nerd Font installed. Obsidian Git connects an Obsidian vault to a Git repository and syncs your notes on a timer, though you need a repository set up first and mobile support is more limited.

For your desktop, Hidden Bar tucks rarely used Mac menu bar icons behind a single arrow. Text Grab on Windows and NormCap on Windows, macOS and Linux both turn a selected area of the screen into text using local OCR, with accuracy that depends on the image. Kando is a pie menu for Windows, macOS and Linux that opens apps and runs commands with a flick of the mouse. Tridactyl gives Firefox Vim-style keyboard control, and Ulauncher is a fast application launcher for Linux, though some of its extensions are no longer maintained.

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.