Author: Adventures in Cubing

AoChuang 5×5 Re-Stickering (Time Lapse)

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It’s not easy to make a re-stickering video interesting. So, why make one at all? In this case, it was an excuse to test the iPhone 6 time lapse feature. Here’s about 30 minutes of scraping, cleaning, and stickering a Moyu AoChuang 5×5 reduced to 100 seconds.

(setup: iPhone 6 tripod-mounted with Charger City adapter; music: The New Deal, “Back to the Middle”)

The puzzle and stickers are from The Cubicle in my standard scheme. The cube looks great and performs even better. Easily the best 5×5 out there. Perfectly suited for me, the worst 5×5 solver out there….

iPhone 240fps Slo-Mo (U Perms)

Adventures in Cubing4 Comments

It seems that iPhone 6 slo-mo videos are all the rage these days. Why not jump on the bandwagon? No doubt slow-motion is useful for teaching new algs and finger tricks. Here’s a quick proof of concept based around my execution of the U-Perms:

(setup: iPhone 6 tripod-mounted with Charger City adapter; music: Kung Fu, “Loose”; cube: Dayan Zhanchi)

Not bad for a phone, eh? Although this was shot under the same light as my other videos, it does appear darker and noisier (with the sensor trying to compensate). It seems that the 240fps frame rate does drop the total light processed by a good 50%. I’ll need to blast it with light next time.

I have an ambitious plan up my sleeves for a video based around the slo-mo feature. But with the clunky workflow (needing to pass the video through the iMovie app before offloading for editing in FCPX), it might be a while before I find a solid uninterrupted block of time for it.

P.S. I just recorded a similar video for the Nb Perm (z D’ (R U’ R2′) D (R’ U D’) (R U’ R2′) D (R’ U R) z’):

(setup: tripod-mounted iPhone 6; music: Kung Fu, “Paragon”; cube: Moyu AoLong v1)

Maybe I’ll consider a series of these….

S-Slice: F2L Edge Flip

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F2L 38
S-Slice Variant

R’ U S’ U’ (R B’ R’) S R B

For a while now, I’ve had a decent alg for flipping a placed but misoriented F2L edge: r (R U R’ U’) r’ U2 (R U R U’ R2). As I wrote earlier, this is a “purer” alternative — in that it does not affect the orientation of the U corners — to the standard algs of R’ U S’ U’ (R B’ R’) S R B and (R U R’ U’) (U’ R U2 R’) d (R’U’R). It’s regripless and fairly fast, but still a bit a clunky.

While learning an S-slice alternative to another F2L case (coming soon), it occurred to me that S may open up possibilities here, too. I reached out to TellerWest, king of tricked out algs, and we identified this as possibility:

R’ U S’ U’ (R B’ R’) S R B

As shown in this video, it works quite well:

S moves are not that easy nor natural for a lot of folks. Continue reading →

Excuses: 34-Sec Ao5

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It just takes an on-camera 34-second Ao5 (this one as a submission for Paradox Cubing’s 10k Subscriber Contest) to remind me that well, uh, I kinda suck at this cubing thing. I know that 34 seconds is impressive to 99.9% of the general population. But three years into this thing, I should be at speedsolving levels, and 34-seconds isn’t really there.

Nevertheless, since I’ve never been bashful about being mediocre and it not really bothering me, I figure that I might as well post the average. But then to show that, gee, maybe I am a wee bit self-conscious about the time, I’ll follow up with an excuse video.

(cube: Dayan Zhanchi; music: Grateful Dead, “The Eleven” (2.14.68))

Sucky, right? And in multiple different ways:

    Continue reading →