HOME PROJECTS

lance dolan . com

useless bum extraordinaire

Projects

Every now and then, I get an itch I need to scratch. Shortly thereafter, I find myself building some useless piece of software the world is not asking for. I never finish these glorious time sinks, but occasionally I get them to a point of usability. Here on this site, against better judgement, I share such piles of algorithmic scrap.

Warhammer Fantasy Army Builder

Warhammer Fantasy is a tabletop game with complex rules. Assembling the rules for your bespoke army, a necessary step before any game begins, can takes hours. This software turns those hours into minutes. It allows a gamer to quickly declare which models they plan to deploy in-game, and then print out a quick reference sheet with all rules for that Army.

It is far from complete and only supports Wood Elves and Demons of Chaos from 8th edition.

Craigslist Search

This was a useful tool for searching craigslist across multiple states at once. Three cars in total were found and purchased by myself and friends using it. However, its underlying integration point was an RSS feed that Craigslist discontinued in autumn 2020. Furthermore, craigslist offers no replacement feed, no public API, and page-scraping is a hack integration too brittle for me to waste time on. Who knows if this app will ever live and breathe again. For now, it's a mere example of the type of error messages I write on hobby projects.

Panhandler Simulator

While sitting in LA traffic and staring at panhandlers, I wondered more and more how much (or how little) they make. More interestingly, what kind of data is necessary to produce a complete picture of their earning potential? This simple calculator resulted. It will surely come off as crass to some. Please trust that this was a lighthearted stab at solving an interesting math problem, and not an attempt to cast anything negative onto our unfortunate homeless neighbors.

Lol Ping Test

The only surviving product of my 2015 venture: Epic Gamer LLC. Also the only software on this list that I'd call "complete." It measures network connectivity to a video game server and advises on whether your connection is safe to play highly competitive games on. I probably had more fun making the promo video for it than the actual app itself.

Directly after release, a plethora of apps showed up on market so similar to mine that I'm tempted to believe someone decompiled my APK. Anyhow, if you play LoL, it's there and waiting for you, ad-free behbeh.

Tournament Manager

I host card-playing tournaments fairly often. A bunch of sweaty guys sitting around the table sipping beers and staring at the cards in their hands. About a million apps exist for managing a tournament but none with exactly the logic and features I wanted, so I built one. It's far from perfect. One day perhaps I'll "finish" it.