2020
We had a fun time at Puzzleworks today. Attempted the Vault and didn’t get it done, but it’s also designed for 10 adults. Parallelism required. There were a lot of puzzles. Well done room! Room 31!
Lasagna assembly, before and after. 👨🍳🇮🇹
My glass fusing is ready to be fired.
Driving north on I-35 and clearly this car didn’t see us at all.
Kyiv Photowalk
I spent the week in Kyiv, Ukraine visiting the SPS team there. I got to travel with three colleagues, including two that had never been there. We went for a long walk on Sunday night and I decided to treat it a bit like a photowalk.
Tesla
We made a quick stop today at a fairly busy store in South Minneapolis and when we got out I decided it would be fun to try the new “Come to me” feature that Tesla shipped in v10. I found a spot on the sidewalk where I could clearly see my car. There were a lot of people walking around and three cars backing out with others coming into their spots. I waited a moment for things to calm down and then press and held the “Come to me” button on my phone.
The Tesla Model 3 lit up and then backed out of it’s parking spot. It then stopped, turned the wheels, and started down the parking lot headed towards me. Then a couple were walking through the lane and I lifted up on the button which stopped the car immediately. Then two cars came down the lane and were behind my now driverless car. Then more people came, and I tried to start the car back toward me but it wasn’t real sure what to do with all the people around.
Now here I am about 70 feet from my car, with it blocking everyone else, and nobody in it. So I quick ran down to the car to rescue it from it’s confusion. Lesson learned, only do this in a pretty calm parking lot.
Automatic Git Pushes with Gitwatch
I’ve been using blot.im to publish my websites for a while. Originally Blot only used Dropbox to manage content for your website, but it now supports git and that is my preference. One of the things I haven’t liked though is having to do git commands all the time as I do things on my blog. Then I found gitwatch and it is perfect for this use case.
Gitwatch watches a folder and anytime something changes it automatically commits it and optional pushes it to a remote. Using gitwatch I can set it running in the background and then do whatever I want with my website and it updates automatically in the background. Pretty great!
Book: Scale
My book club just finished reading Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey B. West. This was a dense book focused on the concept of scaling, in the abstract. The author did a lot of research and shows some surprising scaling views to look at different animals, cities, and even companies. He identifies some amazing correlations that show how entities scale.
I felt like this book was profound, and important. However I wasn’t sure how I would action any of it. 🤔
JSONFeed on Blot
I’ve been enjoying Blot a lot. I’ve enjoyed its approach to blogging. There is plenty of power there, and it’s dead simple to add new content. I’ve now moved most of my websites to Blot, and it supports RSS automatically, but I also wanted to support JSONFeed. When I tried to set that up I could not make it work. I hit a brick wall 🧱 with the Mustache templates that Blot provides, with no ability to safely encode HTML into JSON. I sent an email to David who runs Blot. He replied right away that he was going to add something to make this work. He sent me an email today to let me know he added a {{#encodeJSON}} capability. I plugged it into my view and it worked like a charm.
I’ve spent a bit of time making sure this template works as it should and I think I got it. If you would like to add support for JSONFeed to your Blot site, you can create a new view in a custom template, I used the name jsonfeed.json. Beware that you cannot use the same basename for two different views, so you cannot make feed.xml and feed.json for no good reason. For now, use a different name.
{ {{! First build the header for the feed. }}
"version": "[jsonfeed.org/version/1](https://jsonfeed.org/version/1)",
"title": "{{#encodeJSON}}{{{title}}}{{/encodeJSON}}",
"description": "{{#encodeJSON}}Feed for {{{title}}}{{/encodeJSON}}",
"home_page_url": "{{{blogURL}}}",
"feed_url": "{{{blogURL}}}/jsonfeed.json",
"items": [
{{#recentEntries}}
{ {{! Now create an entry for each post }}
"id": "{{{blogURL}}}{{{url}}}",
"title": "{{#encodeJSON}}{{{title}}}{{/encodeJSON}}",
{{#summary}}"summary": "{{#encodeJSON}}{{{summary}}}{{/encodeJSON}}",{{/summary}}
{{#thumbnail.large.url}}"image": "{{{blogURL}}}{{{thumbnail.large.url}}}",{{/thumbnail.large.url}}
"content_html": "{{#encodeJSON}}{{#absoluteURLs}}{{{body}}}{{/absoluteURLs}}{{/encodeJSON}}",
"date_published": "{{#formatDate}}YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ssZ{{/formatDate}}",
{{#metadata.externalurl}}"external_url": "{{{metadata.externalurl}}}",{{/metadata.externalurl}}
"url": "{{{blogURL}}}{{{url}}}"
}{{^last}},{{/last}}
{{/recentEntries}}
]
}
Once I got this setup Feedbin, which supports JSONFeed, was able to once again see my feeds and pulled in new content right away. It works great! Thanks to David for such a great service as Blot, and for adding this capability to support JSONFeed! 👏
Minnesota Kubb 2019 Winter Tournament
The Kubbchucks played our 8th annual Minnesota Kubb Winter Tournament this weekend. After a week of record cold temperatures we were treated to a fabulous day in the mid-30’s, nice sunshine and no wind. Perfect for winter Kubb!
Round Robin
We opened the round robin versus Team Dondante. This was their first tournament and we helped them with tournament rules. They were good players, but needed to work on their drilling technique. We took the match 2-0 and it went on way too long because we were able to close it out. We went very cold on our 8m and that makes for a long game, if you don’t lose.
We played the Free Agents next, serious Kubb talent here. We had an epic fail in our first game and left a field Kubb on our very first turn, throwing 4 batons at 2 Kubbs. The Free Agents then kindly put us out of our misery. We drug out the 2nd game for a good long time. We got to 8 Kubbs in play and went back and forth for about 20 minutes. Sadly we broke first and left a line, which resulted in the expected immediate loss. 0-2 on that match.
We finished the round robin versus The Four Old Guys, however there were only three of them. They had a good game, just lacked some consistency. We were never really at risk in these games, and closed out the match 0-2.
Bracket
With a 2-1 record out of the round robin we went into the difficult end of the Round of 16.
We had to play Skol in the round of 16. Three monster Kubb players including Evan Fitzgerald. We didn’t stand a chance. On top of that, we played horribly. I don’t mind to lose, but our play was really sub-par. It took about 10 mins for them to put us away.
Free Agents, the team that we lost to in the round robin ended up winning the whole tournament.
We had a great day of Winter Kubb! 👍🏻
