More than a decade ago, Tanczos Istvan put together “HeraldStick,” a software package for heralds running consultation tables at events with poor connectivity. The package let a herald with a Windows laptop run a pocket web server with a copy of the O&A web application and a bunch of sites full of names and armory articles and resources, so they could do the same kinds of documentation lookups and conflict checks that they would normally do online even though they were sitting in a tent beyond reach of wireless links.
Unfortunately, the technology involved had some rough edges, so only a small number of heralds ever got it running, and over the intervening years the increasing availability of fast mobile networks meant that at most sites heralds could piggyback off their phone connections to check these resources.
However there still are a number of events each year in remote locations where links are unreliable or speeds are limited, and the good news is that the state of the art in cross-containerization and platform compatibility has progressed significantly since then, so there was a renewed opportunity to take a second stab at this.
Istvan’s new implementation builds on the Docker platform to provide an O&A package that can be set up and running in minutes. If you already have Docker installed you can just run the ltanzos/oanda image, or you can download Docker Desktop and use the point-and-click interface to search for the image, run it with “host port” set to 8080 and then open http://localhost:8080/ in your browser.