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

On 26 October, thirty free tools and websites joined the directory, along with ten open-source projects from GitHub. I've grouped 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.

For tasks, focus and notes

Goblin Tools is a set of single-purpose helpers, mostly built for neurodivergent people. They break a task into steps, estimate how long things will take or judge the tone of a message. The website is free with no ads, the mobile apps cost a small fee, and like 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 you 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. The free version syncs across devices but stops at 50 notes, and locks and export need Premium.

Data, charts and research

Datawrapper turns pasted or uploaded data into charts, maps and tables you can embed. The free plan lets you make unlimited visualisations with attribution; 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 right in your browser, without uploading anything, and exports SVG files. It doesn't offer hosting or embedding, though.

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 has free animated charts, Dollar Street photos and fact quizzes for exploring global trends in classrooms and presentations. Litmaps shows how research papers cite each other, which helps with a literature review. The free plan is limited to two maps, and alerts need a paid plan.

Learning and writing help

OpenStax, a non-profit at Rice University, publishes free, openly licensed textbooks you can read online or download as PDFs. Prefer paper? Low-cost printed copies are available. Codewars has thousands of coding challenges in more than 50 languages, free with ads. Typing.com teaches keyboarding from beginner lessons all the way to speed practice, free for individuals and schools.

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

If you want to work remotely

Remote OK lists remote jobs with salary ranges and lets you filter by location and time zone. It leans heavily toward tech. 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 gathers remote jobs from across the web and emails you matching roles, with an optional premium membership. As with any job board, check each employer directly before you share personal details.

Design resources to grab

Noun Project hosts millions of icons you can recolour before downloading. They're free with credit to the creator, or you can skip attribution on Noun Pro. Vecteezy has vectors, photos, videos and PNGs, many free with attribution, though lots of the top results are Pro-only. DaFont and FontSpace both have big 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 you'll actually use

Convert Case flips 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. Don't paste sensitive data into any online checker.

Speedtest by Ookla measures download and upload speeds, latency and jitter, and your results depend on the server you pick. Online Mic Test shows a live sound wave so you can check your microphone works before a meeting, though it can't 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 has hundreds of free calculators, many with step-by-step working.

Open-source apps to run yourself

Tasks.org is a free, open-source to-do app for Android. It handles recurring tasks, subtasks, location reminders and sync with Google Tasks, CalDAV, DAVx5 or EteSync. There's 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 backups are on you.

zk and nb are command-line tools for plain-text notes. zk links Markdown notes with templates, tags and backlinks and works with editors like Neovim and VS Code. nb goes further and 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 it runs on Android and Linux too. Getting it onto an e-reader takes a few 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; larger models need more memory.

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.