hardware

My Custom Color Scheme

Adventures in Cubing2 Comments

I get a lot of questions about my color scheme, especially related to the gray U face. I typically sticker white puzzles with full-brights for the “sides” (F, R, B, L), gray for U, and black for D.

I first got the idea from a video by Teal Cubes showing his custom color scheme — blue opposite green, gray opposite white, and pink opposite yellow. The video makes a compelling demonstration that there are schemes better than the 1980s Rubik’s one that most of us use without much further thought. That said, I don’t like pink stickers, and it would have been far too jarring to make three color changes at once. So, I adopted simpler changes.

When I previously wrote about my color scheme, I didn’t really get into the philosophy behind it and deferred exploring particular shades. Time to do that now:

(outro music: “Deep Elem Blues,” Jerry Garcia and John Kahn (5.5.82), in tribute to these Days Between Jerry’s birthday and passing)

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GIANT 3×3 Cube

Adventures in Cubing1 Comment

So, yeah, another “hardware” post. I haven’t stopped learning algs or anything like that. Mucho in the works…just not ready to commit to film yet.

I recently bought from The Cubicle a HeShu Super Big 3×3 cube — or just Giant Cube for short. How giant is giant? Well, not that giant. Let’s go with relatively giant. At 18cm wide, the Giant Cube is a bit more than three times the size of a standard 57mm cube (three times 57mm = 17.1cm). As shown in the video below, a cubie from said Giant is just a bit bigger than a whole 57mm cube:

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Puzzle Collection (June 2014)

Adventures in Cubing4 Comments

I’ve received tons of requests to put together a video showcasing my puzzle collection. I’ve resisted for a while, since I frankly don’t find it that interesting to watch someone talk — and for thirty minutes at that!?! — about their puzzles. But, as one subscriber noted, I do have a few unique cubes in the collection. So, why not? Here’s a video of my puzzle collection as of June 2014:

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Give-Away: Moyu Aolong

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It’s been a while since my last give-away of my custom LED-backlit cube. That was in celebration of hitting 1500 subscribers. Well, it’s been six months, and, although my subscriber count did subsequently increase, it’s plateaued recently. Time to attract new subscribers, while giving current subscribers an opportunity to win as well. Here are the details, which are also summarized in this video (embedded below).

Prize: white Moyu Aolong, stickered with my color scheme (gray up, black down, bright sides)

Duration: June 1 – June 13

Process: Winner chosen randomly based on the entries received by June 13

Entry process:
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Void Cube – Walk-Through, Re-Stickering

Adventures in Cubing

void-cubeIn my last post, I wrote about new custom stickers from Olivér Nagy. Besides some great new custom logo stickers, he and I worked on a sticker template for Rubik’s-brand Void Cubes. The OEM Void stickers have a ridiculous pattern of concentric circles and the color scheme is a bit funky — with white replaced by red and red replaced by a magenta-purple. Re‑stickering to a familiar color scheme made it a lot easier to solve!

As long as I had the camera rolling, I decided to do a quick walk-through video. A lot of folks think the Void Cube is some alien beast when it comes to solves. In reality, with one key parity exception, it solves just like a 3×3. The video walks through that parity issue, which is more fully explained after the jump.

(puzzle: Ruibk’s brand Void Cube w/ custom bright stickers from Olivér Nagy; music: “Ice Flow,” Kevin MacLeod, Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0)

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