Last Friday – I decided to finally buy a Rubik's cube. Amazingly, I've never owned one of these standard cubes in my life. The closest I've gotten to one is a Pyraminx – which I have never gotten down to learning how to solve.

So I went to the shop – and found the Rubik's branded cube to cost AUD27. That's a lot of money for a toy I know I'm gonna break at some point. So I decided to splurge on a cheaper alternative that cost AUD10 – and claimed to be the world's smoothest cube:

My cube - solved slightly more than 100 times at this point.

It is indeed smooth – probably smoother than a Rubik's out of the box (judging from forums and Youtube) – and after about a day of playing, it was good enough to start practising finger tricks on.

I'm of course not particularly fast, currently averaging about 2.5 minutes per solve – compared to the 10 minutes when I started, I'd say that's a massive improvement. I'm using a very basic method with minimal algorithms (about 10 or 11, I think) – I've however expanded that repertoire to roughly 20 at this point – and I expect to have it to double to about 40 by the end of the year. (Hopefully, I can get below 1 minute before the end of the year. )

(As for  how slow I am – it takes me 9 seconds to do the M2 U M2 U2 M2 U M2 H-perm.)

Short rant: Didn't feel like putting this in the sidebar so I'm gonna say it here – I've decided photos are a good compromise since I don't have time to write long rants and articles – I know I've still got that part 3 to write.

And I just know that I'm gonna not post anything next week again. -__- And switch to something else. I guess this is why I called the blog Random Ideas.