Jamie Thingelstad Profile Photo

Jamie Thingelstad

Writer of the Weekly Thing. Blogger. Explorer of tech, the open web, AI, and a good escape room. Maybe a podcast? CTO of SPS Commerce, Board Member of MnTech, Former Board Member Minnestar. Minneapolis is home.

Kubb

Tales of playing the Swedish lawn game Kubb with friends and colleagues. I share snapshots of pickup games, tournament stories and even how we incorporate Kubb into our TeamSPS events.

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    The four bracket winning teams from our 8th annual Team SPS Kubb Tournament!

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    Kicking off the 8th annual Team SPS Kubb Tournament with a quick rules rundown and a 100-person selfie!

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    Ran into some Kubb players from LiHiKubb practicing for the Loppet Kubb Tournament in Linden Hills park on our walk today!

    Person in winter gear walking among yellow and blue Kubb pieces scattered across a snowy field in a Minneapolis park.
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    Before we departed and went our separate ways we setup the Kubb pitch by the PIer B parking lot and showed my brother and family how to play. We put the first grass stains on the new set from JP’s Backyard Games. Everyone had a great time! Kubb for the win!

    Group of people playing Kubb on a grass lawn in front of the docked USCGC Sundew ship numbered 404. Older man in black hoodie tossing a wooden baton toward Kubb pins on a grass field with three onlookers and city skyline behind Three people playing Kubb on a grass field near a parking lot, one mid-throw with a wooden baton aimed at standing wooden blocks. Seven smiling people holding Kubb game pieces near a large cargo ship docked at a waterfront pier.
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    POAP 7450052 at SPS Kubb Tournament 2025.

    Round badge for the 2025 SPS Kubb Tourney 7th Annual event featuring a black and white kubb piece with a blue SPS logo overlay and blue stars around the border
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    Awesome day for the 7th Annual Team SPS Kubb Tournament! Bonus for me to fulfill my wish of being a Kubb tournament director. 

    Smiling man in a straw fedora and Hawaiian shirt holds up a gold medal at the Turf Club at SPS Tower during an outdoor Kubb tournament.
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    Blog Categories via LLM

    After using GPT-5 to create category introductions for my website I got to thinking about the categories themselves.

    With over 9,800 blog posts spanning 20+ years it is daunting to figure out an approach to categories. It is especially daunting to approach them in a way that would make sense to a visitor to my website. As a test, I gave this challenge to GPT-5 using Agent mode. It took 31 minutes to do the research. I have no idea how many web pages it hit on my site (I wasn’t watching!). It gave me a whole report and the results seem really solid.

    Me

    I would like you to do an extensive analysis of my blog archive at this URL:

    www.thingelstad.com/archive/

    I would like you to recommend a new set of categories I could use for my blog posts that may be easier and more useful to visitors. You can feel free to ignore existing categories or use as input into the process. I’m fine if there are a lot of categories, I also wouldn’t want hundreds. It feels like 30-50 categories may be fine, but I’m open to a different count. There are over 20 years of blog posts to categorize. I’m fine if categories only exist for a period of time, they don’t all have to have content throughout the life of my blog.

    GPT-5
    • Travel & Adventure
    • Family & Life
    • Food & Cooking
    • Coffee & Drinks
    • Music & Concerts
    • Sports & Recreation
    • Kubb & Lawn Games
    • Escape Rooms & Puzzles
    • Fitness & Wellbeing
    • Outdoor & Nature
    • Photography & Videography
    • Technology & Coding Projects
    • Crypto & Web3
    • POAP Adventures
    • MarketWatch & BigCharts
    • Work & Leadership
    • Minnestar & Tech Community
    • Books & Learning
    • Charity & Fundraising
    • Candles & Crafting
    • Magic Pines & Cabin Life
    • Road Sign Math & Puzzles
    • Board Games & Tabletop
    • Commentary & Reflections
    • Nature & Weather
    • Pets & Animals
    • Meditation & Mindfulness
    • Travel – Food & Drink
    • Travel – Urban Exploration
    • Events & Conferences
    • Weekly Thing (Newsletter)
    • Other Side Projects

    Each one of these is also provided a description and examples posts that would fit into it. This seems like a great place to use AI.

    Going through my blog and assigning posts to these categories could be done with a script and some vibe coding. Perhaps this will be a winter project for me.

    All of this has me thinking that it would be nice for micro.blog to do this for me. I wouldn’t mind having micro.blog use AI to recommend categories for me. But then separately, now that we have categories with introduction text take each of my blog posts and ask the LLM to categories it into the existing structure. All the data is there. 🤔

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    The kids playing Kubb while we wait for our pizza. Playing with the custom set I won at the USA Kubb Championship.

    Six people posing together on a grass field set up for a game of Kubb with wooden blocks scattered across the lawnTwo kids playing Kubb on a grass field, one holding a wooden baton mid-throw, painted wooden kubbs scattered on the lawn.Three kids playing Kubb on a grass field with red, white, and blue painted wooden blocks scattered across the lawn.

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    After our TeamSPS Kubb Tournament a small group of us had a pickup game that was awesome. We had all 10 kubbs in play!

    Four men playing Kubb on a city lawn, one mid-throw rolling a wooden baton toward a cluster of standing wooden blocks.
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    POAP 7192127 at SPS Kubb Tourney 2024.

    Circular badge for Team SPS Tech 6th Annual Minneapolis Kubb Tourney 2024, featuring a wooden kubb piece on a retro striped background.
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