THE LINK VAULT
79 ENTRIESPowerful websites and software worth knowing about — the things I actually install and actually open. Mostly free, none of it sponsored. New finds get added regularly, so check back or watch the front page.
Photopea FREE
A full Photoshop-class editor in a browser tab. Opens PSD, XCF, Sketch. Costs nothing.
Excalidraw FREE
Whiteboard and diagram tool that looks hand-drawn. The fastest way to explain a system.
Squoosh FREE
Image compression with a live before/after slider. Everything happens on your machine.
CyberChef FREE
The cyber swiss army knife. Encode, decode, decrypt, parse, and convert anything by dragging recipes.
regex101 FREE
Builds and explains regular expressions line by line, so you stop guessing.
Wolfram Alpha FREE
Ask it a maths, physics, or engineering question in plain English and get worked steps back.
diagrams.net FREE
Proper flowcharts, network maps, and wiring diagrams. Free forever, saves anywhere.
CloudConvert FREE
Converts basically any file to any other file when nothing on your PC will open it.
iLovePDF FREE
Merge, split, compress, sign, and unlock PDFs without installing Acrobat.
Cobalt FREE
Clean media saver for the sites you already have a right to save from. No ads, no junk.
Have I Been Pwned FREE
Type your email, find out which breaches it turned up in. Then go change those passwords.
Wayback Machine FREE
Reads the page that got deleted. Nearly a trillion snapshots of the web going back to 1996.
Carbon FREE
Turns a snippet of code into a screenshot that actually looks good in a post.
Claude FREE
The assistant that writes, reasons, and codes alongside you. Runs most of this lab.
Hugging Face FREE
The open model library. Weights, datasets, and free demo Spaces for almost every model.
Ollama FREE
Run open models on your own hardware with one command. No cloud, no bill, no telemetry.
ComfyUI FREE
Node-based image generation. Ugly learning curve, total control once it clicks.
Perplexity FREE
Search that answers the question and shows the sources it used.
Godot FREE
Free, tiny download, no royalties. Excellent 2D, increasingly capable 3D.
Unity PAID
The workhorse. Huge asset ecosystem and the answer to most tutorial searches.
Unreal Engine PAID
Photoreal rendering, Blueprints, Nanite and Lumen straight out of the box.
Blender FREE
Modeling, sculpting, animation, rendering. Free, and genuinely industry-grade.
Aseprite PAID
Pixel art and sprite animation, purpose-built. Worth the money.
Krita FREE
Painting and texture work with excellent brush engines.
GIMP FREE
Photoshop-shaped hole filler for edits, masks, and batch work.
Inkscape FREE
Vector editor for UI, icons, and anything that has to scale cleanly.
Tiled FREE
Tilemap editor that exports to basically every engine.
Kenney FREE
Thousands of clean CC0 game assets. No attribution, no lawyers.
Poly Haven FREE
CC0 HDRIs, textures, and models. The good stuff, actually free.
OpenGameArt FREE
Community art library. Check the licenses, but the well is deep.
Freesound FREE
Field recordings and effects from people who own good microphones.
Mixamo FREE
Auto-rig a humanoid and pull free motion-captured animation onto it.
jsfxr FREE
Retro blips and explosions in one click, in the browser.
LMMS FREE
Free DAW for chiptune, loops, and placeholder music.
HandBrake FREE
Video transcoder with sane presets. Turns a 40 GB rip into something watchable.
Audacity FREE
Multi-track audio editor. Recording, cleanup, noise removal, quick edits.
VLC FREE
Plays the file nothing else will play.
OBS Studio FREE
Screen capture, recording, and streaming. Scene-based and endlessly configurable.
MKVToolNix FREE
Remux, retitle, and strip tracks out of MKV files without re-encoding.
Shotcut FREE
Free non-linear video editor that does not want a subscription.
FFmpeg FREE
The command-line engine underneath half the tools on this page.
IObit Unlocker FREE
"This file is open in another program." No it is not. Unlock it and delete it.
LockHunter FREE
Same job, different approach: shows exactly which process is holding the handle.
Everything FREE
Instant filename search across every drive. Makes Windows Search look broken.
WizTree FREE
Finds what ate your C: drive in seconds by reading the MFT directly.
Microsoft PowerToys FREE
FancyZones, PowerRename, Run, and a dozen things Windows should have shipped with.
Sysinternals Suite FREE
Process Explorer, Autoruns, TCPView. What you open when it gets genuinely weird.
ShareX FREE
Screenshots, scrolling capture, GIF recording, annotation, auto-upload.
Revo Uninstaller FREE
Uninstalls the program AND the leftovers it hid in the registry.
Notepad++ FREE
Fast text editor for config files, logs, and quick surgery.
Bulk Rename Utility FREE
Rename 4,000 files by rule instead of by hand.
Ninite FREE
Tick boxes, get one installer, set up a fresh PC with no toolbars attached.
qBittorrent FREE
Open-source, ad-free torrent client for distro ISOs and big patches.
ImgBurn FREE
The burner that never died. Writes and verifies anything you point it at.
PowerISO PAID
Create, edit, mount, and convert disc images without a physical drive.
7-Zip FREE
Opens every archive format that has ever existed. First install on any PC.
Rufus FREE
Bootable USB drives from an ISO in about thirty seconds.
Ventoy FREE
One USB stick, many ISOs. Drop the files on, pick from a boot menu.
Vortex FREE
Nexus's mod manager. Load order, conflicts, and profiles handled for you.
Nexus Mods FREE
The mod library for most of the big single-player games.
Mod Organizer 2 FREE
Virtual file system modding — never touches your actual game install.
PCGamingWiki FREE
Fixes, config paths, and ultrawide patches for basically every PC game.
SpaceDock FREE
Kerbal Space Program mod hosting that outlived the alternatives.
CKAN FREE
KSP mod manager that resolves dependencies so your save survives.
Planet Coaster 2 PAID
The sandbox Andyland Resort is being built in.
HWiNFO FREE
Every sensor on the machine, logged. The one to open when it is throttling.
CrystalDiskInfo FREE
SMART health for your drives, before one takes the data with it.
CPU-Z FREE
What is actually in this machine, and what speed is it actually running at.
Zen Browser FREE
Firefox-based, calm by design. Vertical tabs, workspaces, split view.
Firefox FREE
The engine underneath, and still the sane default.
uBlock Origin FREE
The only ad blocker worth installing. Wide-spectrum, low overhead.
DOSBox-X FREE
DOS emulation with the knobs exposed — the one for stubborn old games.
ScummVM FREE
Runs the classic point-and-click adventures on modern hardware.
RetroArch FREE
One frontend, every console core, proper CRT shaders.
86Box FREE
Emulates whole vintage PCs down to the chipset. Absurd, and wonderful.
Internet Archive FREE
Decades of software, playable in the browser.
NASA FREE
Missions, imagery, and more open data than you could read in a lifetime.
NASA Image Library FREE
Public-domain imagery for wallpapers, decks, and game backdrops.
Engineering Toolbox FREE
Tables, formulas, and conversions for practically every engineering discipline.
FOUND SOMETHING GOOD?
This vault grows every week. If there is a tool or a site that saved you an afternoon, it belongs in here — send it over and it goes in the next drop.
