Macky's site for speedcubers, blindfold cubers, and cube-addicts...
Cubefreak is dedicated to the manipulation of Rubik's Cube-like puzzles, including speedcubing (solving the Rubik's Cube in least time possible) and blindfold cubing. If you've never heard of speedcubing, watch a few videos. Don't hesitate to send me any questions (but read the FAQ first). Enjoy!
Warning: Speedcubing is highly addictive. Browse with caution.
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05/11: Minor update: OLL and PLL pages now list the probability for each case.
04/30: 800000 visits!
04/18: I won the Princeton Preview Weekend competition (unofficial) with a single time of about 14 sec. Go me. And I met Anthony Hsu.
04/12:
Hey guys-
We're going to be screening CubeFreak at the Edwards Island Cinemas in Newport Beach on Saturday, April 26, at 11am as part of the Newport Beach Film Festival... please help us get the word out! We need to fill the theater, and we need to get as much online 'buzz' as possible! :)
03/21: Cube/juggling demo at Temple City High School (invited by their school cube club). Two successful 3x3 blindfolded solves (one in Rampage).
03/16: Finally, the updated PDF version of the blindfold cubing guide. I made several changes, which are also reflected on the online version. The PDF guide has 26 pages!! but there are lots of pictures and lots of examples. I already put in some efforts to make the pictures come out the way they did (LaTeX isn't made to do things like that), and I just couldn't be bothered to try to figure out how to save more space.
03/08: Made changes to the edge orientation section of the blindfold cubing guide. I'm struggling with wrapping text around figures with LaTeX....
03/03: Algorithm Viewer (written with javascript). You can change whatever comes after "alg=". I'm going to use this to give easy access to applets from the PDF blindfold guide (and also from OLL/PLL page?). I can work on making it possible to change the color scheme later.
01/12: KillaSound's selling cube shirts. Check it out.
01/12: Speedcubing and blindfold cubing demonstration at Mathapalooza 2007 at Los Altos High School in Hacienda Heights. 13 sec speedsolve, blindfold DNF (2 corners) CO:U'-[R'FRF'RU'R'U]x2-U and two D-corners; EO:1 2 6 7 8 10 11 12; CP:(13457628); EP:12-cycle starting with (1 7 11 4 10 ...)
01/01: Version 2.44140625 (third version) of the Blindfold Cubing Guide is now available. There is only one change, but it's an important one; I switched the restriction on edge orientation from (UDFBR2L2) to (UDF2B2RL). There are several advantages to this, which I won't go into here, and most of the top blindfold cubers who use the 4-step 3-cycle method have switched. I'm trying to get used to it now.
01/01: Happy New Year to all puzzlers!
December, 2007
12/31: December was Cubefreak's busiest month ever with 28877 visits by 18379 unique visitors.
12/26: Added another section to Getting Fast with an Easy Method. This is for anyone who does not use full F2L yet and can't average sub-40.
12/25: You can now change the applets' color scheme in the Blindfold Cubing Guide as you like.
12/24: Speedcuber's Shopping Guide. I guess I should have written this before Christmas, but I didn't have the time.
11/10: I won the Caltech Fall 2007 competition with an average of 13.90 in the final round (but it would have been a 13.26 without a +2 penalty). I also placed fourth in 3x3 blindfolded with a best time of 1:59. Do you know how ridiculous that is? There are only 12 cubers in the world who have done a sub-2 min in competition. There were four at this competition, and Chris Krueger wasn't even there.
Congrats to Chris Dzoan for the one-handed world record average! I'm sure Ryan will try to regain this. Will we see a sub-20 average in this category soon? Full results.
Note: +2 penalty on 2nd round 3rd solve (14.08+) and final round 2nd solve (15.49+). Tightened screws after first round.
11/07, 09, 11: More updates on the F2L page. Moved some of the material to Advanced F2L. To do: more logical to talk about different angle before wrong slot? then introduce the two goals for fast F2L first.
11/05: Updated the F2L page with more exposition and examples for some basic techniques. I plan to include a bunch of non-standard algorithms in the near future.
11/05: In the news item for 07/09, I posed the following challenge: "07/09: I'd like to see someone who doesn't know how to solve a cube learn to solve it blindfolded. Would some brave soul please give it a try? It really shouldn't be too hard. You'd be the only person in the world who can say, "I can solve a Rubik's Cube, but only blindfolded" (ok, of course you can use the blindfold method with you eyes open, but you know what I mean)."
11/04: Let me know if I made a mistake in anyone's results for the Negative Time Solving Contest. It's also not too late to submit more times. [edit] Final results are up.
11/03: Lucas Garron made the submission form for Negative Time Solving Contest, and it's kind of awesome. Props to Lucas!
11/03: New format on the Video page. I'll get rid of the tables soon. I'm basically making things look nicer without actually adding new material.
11/03: Does anyone know how to make whatever is inside "a name" tags not be shown like a link using CSS? [edit] Problem solved. Thanks, Ryan.
11/03: Edited the css for headings (not completely done yet). Like the change so far?
11/03: Changed the format of the Links page. I'll be adding more new pages when I get the chance.
October, 2007
10/31: October was Cubefreak's busiest month ever with 24124 visits by 15208 unique visitors. I guess I have the World Championship to thank for this.
10/31: Results from past years of the Negative Time Solving Contest have moved to a separate page. I'm currently working on a php form for submitting results. Hopefully I'll have that up and working by Sunday.
10/28: The same change has been made to the PLL page. The applets are now here.
10/28: The OLL page now has no applets. Instead I copied those into another page.
10/27: I'm thinking that the current font color might be a bit too dim against the background. If I change it to black, this page becomes this. Which one do you think is better?
Changed the main font to #444. Thanks for the input! Also edited the css a bit. You'll notice that I've temporarily stolen the color code from speedcubing.com for the top 3 of the ranking in the negative solving page. I'll find my own color eventually.
10/18: Posted my thoughts on the world championship on the Yahoo! forum.
10/09: My results in World Championship 2007 (Full Results):
7th in 3x3 with an average of 13.43 in the final
3rd in 3x3 blindfolded with a best time of 1:39.56 (AsR, but pretty easy solve) in the final
5th in 2x2 with an average of 5.35 in the final (also a best of 2.82 (AsR), which was a ridiculously easy one-turn complete first layer and COLL)
16th (dead last!) in 3x3 one-handed final, which I managed to get into with a fairly easy 27. I think I should have asked if it's possible to give my place in the final to the 17th finisher in the first round.
September, 2007
09/29: I'm leaving for Budapest today. World Championship 2007 is next weekend. I bet I have to type in QWERTY or some Hungarian variation of that on the hotel computers. That's going to suck.
