Month: February 2011

Finally Finished

I finally finished restickering the 7-cube. The picture is shortly before I finished, I just liked how that looked.

I then scrambled it (using the 100 move scramble generated by my timer) and timed a solve.

63:15.52 was a ridiculously long time for a single solve, but at least twenty minutes of that was spent attempting to finish the last pair of 5×5 center grids. I still haven’t managed to come up with algorithms for that for the 7. On the 5 I can get it within a few moves (also mainly guesses), but that only has a 3×3 grid so it’s much more limited on what pieces can be out of place.

Behind Schedule

The plan today was to start a movie and finish restickering my 7 cube. That hasn’t quite happened yet.

The movie (Inception) came with a digital copy code so I can also download it through iTunes. That’s a nice feature (besides the download time), and it expires so I figured I’d start that downloading. The only problem is that I had the hard drive on my laptop crash a while back so I tend to back things up now, but I never did get around to configuring the Samba share on my linux server to share to the windows network. I’ve been using it by switching to linux on my laptop, but I figured I should just go ahead and get that set up.

Setting up Samba to share files was rather easy (Samba Guide), but I also have a printer hooked up to that server that’s supposed to be accessible over the network. I know when I first set it up I was able to print the test page, but I haven’t gotten it to print since. With Samba finally configured I could see the printer across the network, but I haven’t been able to get it to print still (even after finally getting win7 to find the driver).

Update: Even though win7 had found the correct driver through windows update and set that printer to use it the driver apparently wasn’t installed. Talore got bored watching me fight this and went to sleep on the shelf by the balcony, which happens to be right next to the printer, so when windows finally (on the fourth time I told it to do so) installed the driver and printed the test page Talore was awakened by the printer. Once it stopped printing she looked around a bit and went back to sleep.

Now I guess I need to figure out why my laptop complains that access is denied when I try to print from it, but I think that can wait. I also should probably figure out how to install the driver for the printer on my server so I can print to it without having the driver installed locally.

The other distraction I’ve had was my Pyraminx. I figured out how to solve it the day I got it and even timed some solves, but we now have scoreboards for the 2-5 cubes and the pyraminx so I need to get better at solving it quickly. I did get a new personal fastest solve of 27.69 seconds (the world record is under 3s), but my average now is slower than the day I got it.

For the sake of the 5-cube scoreboard I did 5 solves the other day to get a 3 of 5 average (9:45.18), but that took me around an hour for 5 solves so I may try to get faster at it but I don’t know that I’ll dedicate all that much time to it.

I have a single time put on the 4-cube scoreboard, but I haven’t memorized the algorithm to fix one of the parity errors (I figured everything but that out on my own) so a reasonably quick solve is completely dependent on luck for me. My 4-cube was also rather hard to turn, so I took it apart to clean it and it’s sitting on my table waiting for me to be finished with the 7-cube. From the looks of the insides of it cleaning and re-lubing it will help a lot, and it really needs it.

Cube Sabotage

It was discovered yesterday that we didn’t get the cubes we thought we were getting. Calvin liked Ryan’s cube enough to decide to order it, but Ryan sent Calvin the amazon link to the second generation DaYan cube instead of the third generation one. We took them apart and the third generation one is significantly more sculpted on the inside, which probably means smoother cornering, but it also has a reputation for having pieces pop out easily, so Ryan’s is tightened down to the point that it doesn’t corner as well as mine does.

Either way, I’m happy with mine. It’s a very significant upgrade over my old cube and with it I’ve improved my times nearly to the point they were before I switched solve methods.

Not helping my times is the weather. It’s been well in the negatives the last couple days, and even though my heater is on it’s still chilly inside my apartment, so my fingers are a bit lacking in speed. Tuesday the high was -2 degrees Fahrenheit (low of -14), and despite the fact that it made it all the way up to +3 degrees today it’s currently -15. Tomorrow it’s supposed to get up to a nice warm 35 degrees! At least my car has started despite the cold. It sounds like it doesn’t want to, so I’ve been giving it a few minutes to warm up before I drive anywhere, but the steering is still stiff till about the time I get out of the apartment complex.

I stickered my 3 cube last Saturday while taking a break from stickering the 7 cube. The entire 3 cube only has seven more stickers than a single side of the 7, so I ended up doing it all at once including trimming sticker corners where the shape of the face made that a good idea (I don’t want the tiles sticking out over the edge of the piece, makes it too easy to peel them up).

I’m a little over half way through with the 7 cube, having not worked on it the last few days, but here’s a picture of the state it was in on Friday:

No picture of the new 3 cube, but it looks almost exactly like the standard Rubik’s cube on the outside so there’s not much to see anyways.