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.

Apr 11, 2015 ∞

Ready for Kubb practice! 42 batons!

Green plastic tub filled with 42 wooden Kubb batons of varying sizes and wear, sitting on a concrete floor.

Apr 2, 2015 ∞

Tammy and I played our inaugural game of Kubb at our cabin. Seemed appropriate to do so with an official USA Kubb set!

Woman in a light blue sweater throwing a wooden baton at wooden block targets arranged on a grassy lawn during a game of Kubb

Nov 22, 2014 ∞

Magic Pines

Gray wood cabin with upper deck and arched window atop a grassy hill, reached by a stone path, surrounded by evergreens in late autumn

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!

Nov 16, 2014 ∞

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:

screenshot

This works really well. You can grab q2a-number-captcha and git clone it for your own use.

Oct 26, 2014 ∞

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.

SPS Kubb Event
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