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.
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!
