hardware

crystal cube hack – part 1

Adventures in Cubing4 Comments

Ghost Hand Crystal Cube

Part 2 available here.

I thought it would be a fun novelty to have a cube that lit from its core. It would make it easier to cube in dim light — and, let’s face it, not being able to cube in dim light tops the serious first world problems list!?! And it would be fun. There are some decent glow-in-the-dark cubes (e.g., the C4U ones). But those have to be “charged” and need a very dark environment to glow. They also don’t help one bit with sticker colors.

It turns out that there is at least one model of light-up cubes: The Ghosthand Crystal Cube, which is a bargain at a mere $5.99. Knowing I’d want to “hack” the cube, I bought three.

Hack it? Yep, hack it. Continue reading →

Eppur Si Muove (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Dyed Cubes)

Adventures in Cubing2 Comments
Yes, I know this is a LONG post. It really needs the backstory to contextualize (and justify) the cube-dying project. If you’re here for the DIY only, skip to the jump.

Backstory — The Force Cube

I’ve been cubing for about seven months now, and, in so doing, have gotten four friends to take up cubing. The five of us have spent our fair share of time on amazon.com and comparing notes, and have each come to favor Dayan Zhanchis as our go-to speed cubes. No real surprise there; many consider Zhanchis the gold standard. The surprise is more subtle. Of the three varieties of Zhanchis (black, white, multi-colored unstickered), we each rank them in exactly the same order: first, the unstickered; second, white; third, black. There’s just something “softer,” smoother yet clickier, more controllable about the unstickered cubes. We guessed that the matching preferences were the result of either small differences in the plastics or a shared placebic hallucination.

Slightly confounded, I found validation in this speedsolving.com thread about the “Force Cube.” Turns out another cuber, AL60RI7HMIS7, also had a hankering for stickerless Zhanchis. Realizing that they weren’t competition legal (the piece edges reveal the color of a face pointing away from you), she came up with a clever solution: Buy six stickerless Zhanchis, disassemble, and then reassemble, creating six different Zhanchis — each of a single color of plastic (read: competition-legal), and each made of the stickerless plastic that many some cubers prefer. Those solid colored cubes could then be stickered like any other cube. BRILLIANT! The only rub was that six Zhanchis would generate only one white cube, with five “byproduct” cubes in undesirable colors. Of course, none of the six were black.

Continue reading →

RIP, Zhanchi No. 1

Adventures in Cubing1 Comment
PROLOGUE: We can make type look like HEADLINES or fine print; emphasize the important parts with color, boldfacing, italics, or highlight; use superscript or subscript notation; strike-through to show edits,

blockquote (like this) to draw focus,

and switch to fixed-width to show code. But there is no neat, and tidy way to indicate “hey, I’m about to get all facetious and sardonic on you.”

I hereby propose Comic Sans as the official signal of sarcasm on the internet.And, even if you never read another word on my blog again, I’ll be ok — as long as you promise to read this McSweeney’s opus: “I’m Comic Sans, A**hole.” So. Friggin. Good.

My Zhanchi died last Thursday. FUBAR. In the middle of learning the N Perm, it locked up on me. And not just an align-better-and-proceed lock up (à la Rubik’s brand cubes). Jammed. Stuck. No bueno. With some elbow grease, I eventually got it unstuck, by which I mean that the yellow-green-orange corner and yellow-orange edge each violently ejected. The corner piece was gnarled and twisted so badly that, even after straightening it by hand, the cube would barely turn when I replaced the pieces. Open heart surgery — some heat, crazy glue, counter-twisting, etc. — barely helped. The re-assembled cube just didn’t want to turn any longer. I pronounced the cube dead a few minutes later. Continue reading →