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adventures in cubing

A journey down the rabbit hole of Rubik's-style puzzles

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Custom Cube Mat

September 6, 2014January 19, 2018Adventures in Cubing1 Comment

I’m still here. Work travel, family vacation, the kids back in school, and soccer season starting. All of a sudden a month passes….

As I get back into the swing of things, I wanted to make this quick video showcasing my new custom cubing mat and previewing a few projects and tutorials queued up for the next few weeks:

As described in the video, the mat design is a simple “segment” from the denser cube patent composite poster I had made last year. The centerpiece is the main US patent issued to Erno Rubik in 1983, based, as it were, on his 1978 Hungarian patent. I set it up on graph paper to make it seem like an engineer’s sketch, laid it out on a bias, and did a full-bleed to make it more modern. After some debate, I decided to make the background gray, rather than black. The reduced contrast would make it less distracting as a background for videos, I figured.

I ordered the 14″ x 24″ mat from Inked Playmats for $24. Their service was great, and the mat arrived three days after I updloaded the art. The quality matches a standard mousepad, but is much thinner (at about 1/16″). I’d definitely recommend the Inked Playmats.

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The Cube Specialists Stickers

August 10, 2014January 19, 2018Adventures in Cubing1 Comment

In my last post on my color scheme, I focussed on The Cubicle. I mentioned but didn’t really discuss The Cube Specialists. This video showcases my sticker collection and organization and highlights the excellent stickers from the Cube Specialists:

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New Logo Stickers (+ Void Cube)

February 4, 2014January 20, 2018Adventures in Cubing2 Comments

g-logo-evolution_2I’ve been a little obsessed with finding the perfect logo and the perfect logo stickers to go with it. I think this is my third or fourth post about logos and stickers, having previously written about stickers from both Olivér Nagy and (the now-defunct) Puzzle Addictions.

Time to order new stickers, I turned to Olivér’s store again. I ordered stickers to match my more refined (drop-shadowed and “glared”) logo. I also developed new variant to match my unique color scheme on white cubes — switching yellow to gray, white to black, and the black gridlines to white to emulate white plastic. As shown in this video, the stickers came out great!

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New Blog Design

March 2, 2013March 2, 2013Adventures in CubingLeave a comment

Welcome to the newly designed Adventures in Cubing! Goodbye, old cluttered site….

under-constructionIt is ironic, I suppose, that I spent so little time designing the last site — given that I’ve developed probably a dozen other sites, all with painstaking forethought, planning, and attention to detail. By contrast, I assembled the original AIC slapdash in about an hour. Tempered by self-consciousness and certain that the blog would die on the vine, my goal was to keep it wordpress.com-hosted (so much easier than self-hosting), avoid jquery/php/html editing (modifying only CSS via the Custom Design add-on), and put as little time into it as possible (about 90 minutes). So, I loaded up the Spectrum theme, played around with the CSS, and called it a day.

That was about 14 months ago. Now that the blog has matured and I am more certain of its future, I wanted to develop a more polished and refined site. For me, that means a far more minimal and clean design language. I think I’ve accomplished that here, with a customized version of the free Twenty Twelve theme. The full-width header is simple, with its bold color and now-front-and-center logo. The integrated search box with the image-sprited magnifying glass submit button took a fair bit of work, given that I had only CSS with which to work. Some negative margins did the trick, but they do break the blog in Explorer. (Oh well…. I’m done developing for users browsing with hoary technology.) The understated sidebar distracts less from the more important post content, while keeping sprited icons for the Minutiae section.

In the name of posterity and in the spirit of contrast, here’s a reminder of what the old site looked like (click to enlarge):

2012-site_thumb

While there’s still a lot of fine sanding left, I’m pleased with the basic structure. I don’t think the default theme handles comment links very well, plopping them awkwardly at the top of posts without any thoughtful integration. Without the ability to get at the html/php structure, I can’t extract just the comment number (to place in a subtle speech bubble or megaphone or the like). For now, I’ve opted to hide (display:none) the links. The post footers need some refining still, too. It might be time, finally, to drop Feliks’ video; for now, I dropped it to the bottom of the sidebar. I’m also exploring different link colors (I surprised myself by liking red hovering to gray) and whether I want to underline them in their normal or hover states. And there’s a bunch of old per-post styling I had shortsightedly done that I now want to pull into the stylesheet.

All in due time….

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Let Them Eat Cake

February 10, 2013June 15, 2013Adventures in Cubing1 Comment

My wife rocks.

Awesome birthday cake (interpreted … um … interestingly by the bakery)!

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