stickers

DIY YJ Yulong Phantom Cube

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A quick post and a quick video. I caught a glimpse of the Maru CX3 Phantom Cube the other day and really dug it. In contrast to a typical cube of black plastic with colored stickers, the phantom has black stickers on colored plastic. It’s basically a stickerless cube stickered (on all six sides) with black stickers.

Since I had a handful of black stickers and a Yulong stickerless cube laying around, I figured I could make one myself:

I’ve always been intrigued by stickers on colorless cubes anyway, and this one performs pretty well. That said, the “inverted” scheme makes color recognition really tough. A fun cube, but definitely not one for speedsolving.

AoChuang 5×5 Re-Stickering (Time Lapse)

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It’s not easy to make a re-stickering video interesting. So, why make one at all? In this case, it was an excuse to test the iPhone 6 time lapse feature. Here’s about 30 minutes of scraping, cleaning, and stickering a Moyu AoChuang 5×5 reduced to 100 seconds.

(setup: iPhone 6 tripod-mounted with Charger City adapter; music: The New Deal, “Back to the Middle”)

The puzzle and stickers are from The Cubicle in my standard scheme. The cube looks great and performs even better. Easily the best 5×5 out there. Perfectly suited for me, the worst 5×5 solver out there….

My Custom Color Scheme

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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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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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