Mind. Blown.
Jump to 55 seconds in the below video to see a ridiculously ambitious and perfectly executed project by tehcubedude. He wrote lyrics from Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” on cubies that come together in sync with the song as he “solves” the cube.
Goodonya, mate. Wow.
I’m not a big megaminx solver, as you can tell from my walk-through post. But I do find it a fun break from cubic puzzles. I prefer Dayan megaminxes (with ridges). Like all things Dayan, the stickerless version is excellent. I also have a black one at work, but have never liked the look of the cheap OEM stickers — with their darker shades and poor contrast between like colors. The greens, for example, always seemed too similar, as did red and orange. And cream is just a nasty color.
So, when The Cubicle added Megaminx stickers to their totally awesome sticker picker series, I ordered replacements for the OEM stickers Here’s an overproduced video showing the before/after results (complete with explosions!):
It’s been a little while since my last post — that monster parity article that still has my head hurting. I’ve got a couple things in the works, but I put them aside when I got a Maru CX3 the other day. I’m really impressed with the cube, and I found my turn style and speed improving with it. On a whim, I thought I’d give a sub-60 PLL Time Attack another go with the CX3. I came awfully close, at 60.65 seconds. Here’s the video (with apologies for some of the out-of-frameness):
Generally, I find the OLL “dot” cases frustrating — there are a bunch of them, they’re hard to identify/distinguish quickly, and their algorithms are long. A few months ago, I worked on a couple OLL dot cases that I had previously two-looked. Those came rather easily. Then I got side-tracked by the Megaminx, 4×4 modding, and PLL time attacks.
I decided to work on more OLLs last week, after stumbling onto Ottozing’s very good Cubing World video showing all of the dot cases. Specifically, these three:
OLL #18
|
OLL #19
|
OLL #20
|
I’ve been on a Megaminx kick for the past 10 days. After posting that 10-minute (plus) non-last-layer solve, I practiced a bit more and finally did learn the last layer (beginners’ tutorial coming soon). I’m down to about 6 minutes now for a full solve. With one exception that I’ll point to in my upcoming last layer post, I couldn’t find many good Megaminx tutorials online. Instead, I kept bumping into statements that solving a Megaminx is just like solving a 3×3 — but with a bunch more F2L steps. Yeah, that is basically right. But not entirely.
On a cube there are just 4 F2L slots. Except for some incremental efficiency gains, there’s really no magic to the order in which you fill those slots. On a Megaminx, order does matter — at least, I found that certain face/slot orders flows more smoothly, with a lot less potential for accidentally destroying already-solved portions.
I also found that there will always be one tricky V-shaped slot formed by an edge-corner-edge (ECE) trio. In the end, it turns out that’s it’s not that hard to form and insert the trio without breaking up the solved neighboring faces. I just wish someone would have created a clear tutorial one it, since it’s not entirely intuitive. Having figured out a technique that worked well for me, I decided to do a quick walk-thru video showing the face/slot order I use and then explaining the way I fill that ECE trio:
This is a beginner doing a beginner’s work; there’s some inefficiency and excess hunting throughout. Continue reading
adventures in cubing 