Today's Picks: May 21, 2026
Every day the internet spawns new tools and interesting websites. Today we picked three standout finds from Hacker News' front page — an offline CPU-only transcription tool, an interactive map of heavy metal history, and a browser-based DOS game collection straight out of childhood memories.
1. yapsnap — CPU-Only Video Transcription
yapsnap is a genuinely impressive little tool. Just paste a YouTube, X, TikTok, or Instagram video URL — or drop a local MP4 file — and it transcribes the audio to plain text on your local CPU. No GPU, no cloud uploads, no API keys required.
It uses a Streaming Zipformer Transducer model (Kroko English) that runs at several times realtime speed even on a regular laptop. After an ~80MB one-time model download, it works completely offline. For anyone who needs to quickly extract content from videos for notes, subtitles, or offline archiving, this is a productivity game-changer.
2. Map of Metal — Wikipedia for Metalheads
Map of Metal isn't a site you visit daily — but once you find it, you might spend half an hour exploring. It maps the entire history of heavy metal subgenres (Thrash, Black, Death, Doom, Progressive, and beyond) onto an interactive timeline, with each node featuring album art and descriptions of representative bands.
From Black Sabbath in the 70s to today's avant-garde metal, you can visually trace when each genre emerged and who influenced whom. Want to understand the difference between Deathcore and Melodic Death Metal? The visual map explains it better than ten articles.
3. DOS Zone — Childhood in Your Browser
DOS Zone hosts hundreds of classic DOS games playable directly in your browser — no registration, no download needed. From Doom, Prince of Persia, Wolfenstein 3D to GTA: Vice City and Duke Nukem, pretty much every DOS classic you can think of is there.
The site is neatly organized alphabetically and by genre, search is snappy, and it even works on mobile. For retro gaming fans, this is a genuine time machine — open a tab and rediscover the late nights you spent on your 486.
That's it for today's picks. If you've found a cool tool, drop us a line!
