Kubb
Kubb starting with Minnesota Kubb getting things going!
Ready for Kubb practice! 42 batons!
Tammy and I played our inaugural game of Kubb at our cabin. Seemed appropriate to do so with an official USA Kubb set!
Magic Pines
After years of talking about getting a cabin we have finally made the big leap! Tammy has been looking at cabins for a while now and we found one that really fits what we were looking for. It’s close to home (45 minutes from our house!) has a great, warm feel and is on a good sized lake with just over an acre of land. Great spots to play outside, setup a Kubb pitch, hang a hammock and have a fire pit along with a dock to get on the lake. It already has a name, Magic Pines.
We close in January and are excited for fun weekends away. This is completely new territory for us. It’s going to be a fun adventure!
Question2Answer Number Captcha
I’ve been using Question2Answer for a number of years now to power Ask Planet Kubb. I like Question2Answer because it is simple to run, uses a standard PHP + MySQL setup and can even be used in a multi-site farm configuration easy enough. However, I’ve been frustrated by it’s ability to manage spam registrations.
Question2Answer has built in support for ReCaptcha and it has a plugin method to use other anti-spam measures. I’ve used ReCaptcha for a while, but it results in 4 to 10 spam registrations a day. I tried switching to the Q2A Logical Captcha by amiyasahu which uses Text Captcha. I even submitted a pull request to properly salt the captchas. But this resulted in 3-4 times the spam registrations as ReCaptcha! Ouch!
I decided to apply the same type of spam defense I’ve successfully used for MediaWiki and early results are great. It uses the Numbers_Words PHP package to spell out a number of nine digits and then ask the user to identify the number in a specific position. The question looks like this:
This works really well. You can grab
q2a-number-captcha and
git clone it for your own use.
SPS Kubb Class
Garrick and I joined forces and auctioned off a Kubb Class at the annual SPS Charity Auction this year. The sales engineering team won the event and we got 12 of them together this past week for a tournament level Kubb class. It was an awesome time with a ton of great questions on the game and a jump-start into Kubb strategy and technique.
Great Kubb event with #TeamSPS today! Sporting Planet Kubb shirts and US National Kubb Championship set!
Gorgeous day for US National Kubb Championship!
Kubb at Lake Harriet
Most of the time when I see people playing Kubb around Minneapolis they are folks I know from Minnesota Kubb. It was fun today to stop on a bike ride around Lake Harriet and right by the bandshell were 6 women having a nice game of Kubb. They were playing with a Bex set, the pitch was a bit small and they were doing that weird thing where you stack field kubbs on top of each other. But, they were having a blast throwing wood!
At Nomad Pub Minneapolis for Burroughs Bocce Cup! Bocce is no Kubb, but still lots of fun. I wonder if PlanetBocce.com is available. 🙂
Rubiks Kubbs: Making a Rubik’s Kubb ← This is awesome. 😊
Passed through Kubb Capital of North America (Eau Claire, WI). No stopping, 9 hour road trip today.
Noting that Minnesota Kubb has hosted three Kubb tournaments this year. Think only USA Kubb has hosted as many in a year in the states.
Beach Kubb with Tyler today.
Great video about 2013 US National Kubb Championship tournament.
There are a lot of people at the American Swedish Institute playing Kubb! Nice job Minnesota Kubb!
Kubb unites people and creates peace.
Kubb paraphernalia.
There could easily be 10 pitches of Kubb going here! Great job Minnesota Kubb!
Enjoying some Really Goods with my coffee. Delicious. (Official sponsor of US National Kubb Championship)
Pictures from 2013 US Nationals Kubb Championship
I didn’t get much time to take photos at the 2013 US Nationals Kubb Championship. Saturday was a day focused my team the Kubbchucks progressing through the bracket, and hoping that our club, Minnesota Kubb, did really well. Sunday I was mostly focused on scoring games for Planet Kubb and running the final parts of the Planet Kubb Club Championship. I did get my camera out for about an hour and get some shots in, but only from Sunday.
