Reviews for many cubes are riddled with complaints about sticker quality. And, like clockwork, every time someone complains about the quality, someone snarks, “Who cares? You’ll replace it with Cubesmith stickers in a month anyway.” Having taken a recent liking to my ShengEn Type F-II, I wore through the stickers quite quickly. As Cubesmith seems to be the go-to vendor for replacement stickers, I grabbed a couple different sets, includung a lexan textured “tiles” set. It took about 30 minutes to remove the old stickers with a Scrape-Rite plastic blade and replace them with the tiles. Continue reading
hardware
magnetic dice cube
I frequently use CubeTimer.com to time my solves. I just noticed a “Links” link above the timer, clicked it, and stumbed onto MagneticCube.com — which sells, not suprisingly, magnetic cubes.
The video below shows how they work. Although it appears to require quite a bit of force to turn each layer, it is still a very clever concept.
With a $59 price tag, it’s probably not the resistance that will keep me from buying one. But a really cool novelty cube nevertheless. (Perhaps I’ll hazard the DIY project one day….)
cubism, the shirt
I love Woot, and especially Shirt Woot. Clever designs screened on Amercian Apparel shirts, slung via genius copy writing, and all for $10/shirt (to your door!). Back in September, before I even knew how to solve a cube, I grabbed this shirt for our now-four-year-old:
As the copy explained in prose:
His command of math was really near-cherubic
That game designer they called Erno Rubik
He could turn a little math
Into a bunch of moving squares
And so
Erno Rubik not even once had to boot lick
adventures in cubing 