Other fun things · South East Queensland
SEQ Golf Finder
It's 2pm on a Tuesday. Where can I still get a round in before dark?
Free · on your phone · installs like an app · no account
By day
Which courses you can reach and finish before last light
Deciding on a last-minute round is a sum: how long's the drive, how long's nine holes, when does it get dark, and is it going to blow a gale. Golf Finder does that sum for 63 courses around Brisbane, the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast and Toowoomba, and tells you which ones still work.
Every course gets three times: when to leave, roughly when you'd tee off, and the last call for getting a round in before last light. It works off last light rather than sunset, because the end of twilight is when you actually stop being able to find your ball.
Under that is the weather at your tee time, not now: wind first, because that's the one that changes your round, then the temperature and the chance of rain, with a flag if storms are forecast.
The sky at the top
The sun moves across it between sunrise and last light, with flags for the last sensible tee-off for 18 holes, 9 and a par-3. Cloud and rain are drawn into it.
Filters that matter
Playable now, 18 or 9 holes, par-3s, under half an hour away, visitor-friendly, no booking needed, by region, or just your favourites.
A wind compass
Wind at your spot every fifteen minutes, twelve hours ahead, at ground level and higher up where the ball flies. Point your phone down the shot and it tells you head or cross and how long it'll play.
On the course
A rangefinder and a scorecard, on 28 of the courses
Press ⛳ Play on a course that has it and the app becomes a caddy. The hole map is drawn from OpenStreetMap, tee at the bottom and green at the top, with the fairway, bunkers, water and trees.
How far, really
Front, middle and back of the green from where you're standing, or tap anywhere on the map to measure to it. It adjusts for the wind along your actual line and gives you a plays-like distance.
Your bag, and what to hit
Put in your clubs and how far you carry them and it suggests one. Tag your shots as you go and the averages come from what you actually hit rather than what you think you hit.
It keeps score for you
It moves to the next hole when you walk to the next tee and fills in your score from the shots you mark. Course handicap from the rating and slope, strokes per hole, net and Stableford.
Stats afterwards
Fairways, greens, putts, scrambling, sand saves, driving distance, per-club numbers, and where your strokes are going. Hole-in-ones are logged, obviously.
Three of the 28 are scorecard only, without the GPS map. The maps are only as good as the course's OpenStreetMap outline; a few have been re-traced from aerial photos.
By night
After dark it looks up instead
Once there's no golf left in the day, the app turns into a guide to the southern sky.
The sky over you
Stars placed for where you are and what time it is, with the constellation lines drawn in. Hold your phone up and it follows where you point it.
What's worth going outside for
Planets, the Moon's phase, meteor showers, the Space Station, eclipses and comets, each on a card you can open for the story behind it.
Aurora watch
A live aurora map on a globe, the three-day forecast, and how far north the southern lights might reach. It can warn you while the app is open.
And there's an orrery: the planets where they really are today, with a date slider, zooming out past Pluto to the probes that are leaving.
What it won't do
Worth knowing before you rely on it
- It's South East Queensland. You can set your location to other Australian cities for the night sky, but the golf courses are SEQ's, plus two in Melbourne.
- Drive times are estimates. They come from distance and typical traffic for the time and day, not live traffic, and they're labelled that way.
- It doesn't know about tee times. The button takes you to the club's own booking page. Whether there's a slot is between you and them.
- Green fees and course details are typed in by me and can go out of date. If one's wrong, tell me.
- Plays-like distances don't account for slope yet, and the wind is a forecast, not a measurement.
Tracking
It doesn't track you. It does need the internet.
This one's different from the games, and I'd rather say so up front. The games make no network requests at all. Golf Finder can't work like that: the weather, the sunset and the aurora forecast have to come from somewhere.
What the app doesn't do
No account, no sign-up, no analytics, no ads, no cookies and no crash reports. Nothing counts who uses it or how. Even the fonts are served with the app rather than fetched from Google.
Your rounds stay on your phone. Scores, stats, your bag, favourites and settings are kept in your browser and sent nowhere. That also means there's no backup unless you make one, so use the export button now and then.
What it sends, and to whom
Your coordinates go to Open-Meteo for the weather and wind, and to sunrisesunset.io for sunrise and sunset. They're used to work out drive times and the sky on your phone, and go nowhere else. Say no and pick a city instead, and those services get the city's coordinates rather than yours.
Space weather and the aurora forecast from NOAA, the Space Station's position, and occasionally a course outline from OpenStreetMap. None of these are sent your location.
Directions open in Google Maps, and Tee times opens the club's own site or GolfNow. Once you're there, their privacy terms apply, not mine.
The app is served by GitHub Pages at foxorama.github.io. Like any web
host, GitHub sees the request when your phone loads the app. I don't get anything
from that.
This page counts page views. The app still counts nothing.
This page is on vulpecula.games, which counts page views like the rest of the
site: the page, where you came from, your country and a rough browser type. No
cookie, nothing stored on your device, no identifier that follows you. The app itself has
none of that. More on the site's analytics.
Made and licensed
Same arrangement as the games
I had the idea, decided what it should do, and I'm the one who tests it and says whether it's right. The AI (Claude) wrote the code. Most of the changes in the history are co-written with it, and the repository is public, so you can see exactly how.
Golf Finder is © 2026 Vulpecula Games, all rights reserved, the same as the games. The source is public, so you're welcome to read it, quote it and learn from it, but that isn't a licence to reuse it. If you want to use something, ask. The answer is usually yes.
It used to be open source. Versions up to the end of August 2026 were published under the GNU AGPL v3, and copies of those versions keep those terms.
That covers my own work: the code, the text and the design. What it's built on isn't mine and keeps its own terms:
- Course maps are derived from © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the ODbL.
- The stars come from the HYG database, and the world map on the aurora globe from Natural Earth. Both are public domain.
- The fonts, DM Mono and Syne, are under the SIL Open Font License.
- Weather is from Open-Meteo, sunset times from sunrisesunset.io, space weather from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, and the Space Station's position from wheretheiss.at.
- The night-sky artwork was generated with Black Forest Labs' FLUX models, under their terms.
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