10 Online Oddities

Sponsor an otter
For a one-off fee of £35 you can sponsor an otter at the Dartmoor Otter Sanctuary. This gets you a sponsorship certificate, a photo of your otter and a year’s free admission. Otters on offer include a short-clawed Asian called Rosie and the “particularly handsome” Hamish.

Develop psychic powers
From reading people’s minds to moving objects around without touching them, there are plenty of advantages to being psychic. This website explains how to develop your psychic powers, channel your energy and remove mental blocks. It may just be mumbo jumbo but it’s certainly interesting.

Blow bubbles
Andie and Mike are a couple in Florida who have a commercial bubble machine in their back garden. They’ve kindly set this site up so visitors can click a button to release a 30-second blast of bubbles and then watch the results live via webcam. You may need to wait for your turn.

Discover your death date
Websites don’t come more morbidly fascinating than The Death Clock. Specify your date of birth, sex, BMI, mood (pessimistic, optimistic or sadistic) and smoking status to calculate your time of passing. More positively, there are links to health sites to help you delay that death date.

Play with a spider
If you want to confront your arachnophobia or just fancy having an eight-legged pet, try this site. It lets you drag a realistic Flash spider around a world map using your mouse. You can adjust its speed and size to your preference, and press your Space bar to add insects for it to eat.

Turn into a celebrity
Find out which famous person you most look like and become them using this innovative celebrity morphing tool. It works by applying face-recognition technology to a photo of you to determine your celebrity lookalikes. You can then create a video showing your mug morph into one of theirs.

Make a sand sculpture
Building sandcastles is great fun, but not when grains get in your shoes, eyes or lunch. There are no such worries at this site, which lets you sculpt elaborate seaside landscapes in your browser using virtual sand. You can experiment with different colours for some dazzling results.

Search by singing
Got an annoying tune stuck in your head but don’t know it’s called? Visit Midomi and sing, hum or whistle a few seconds of the mystery song into a microphone or mic-enabled webcam and the site will find and identify it. You can also contribute your own renditions of tracks. 

Pop virtual bubble-wrap
Everyone loves the sound and feel of popping bubble-wrap, but what can you do when all your bubbles are burst? Go to this site, that’s what, and indulge in some virtual bubble-wrap popping. It even offers an Insane mode that plays bizarre noises, such as a toilet flushing, as you pop.

Visit the end of the internet
The web may be constantly expanding, but that doesn’t make it infinite – at least according to this message. “You have reached the very last page of the internet,” it reads. “Now turn off your computer, go outside and play”. Around 8,000 other pages also claim to be the last internet page.