25th anniversary of the Rubik's Cube

Tuesday 26 July 2005 was the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Rubik's Cube. I was lucky enough to be part of the official birthday celebrations - including the birthday party and speedcubing demonstrations at Hamley's Toy Store on Regent Street in London!

A selection of the photos that Peter took are below. To see the rest, check out my Rubik's Cube 25th anniversary page.

Dan and I sitting on the enormous Rubik's Cube

Me in front of the enormous Rubik's Cube

Dan and I cutting the Rubik's Cube birthday cake

Dan being interviewed for a local radio station

Me doing a solve for the radio guy. Unfortunately that 17.70 on the stackmat tournament display was my time for finishing the F2L, not the whole cube. I'm not that fast yet. The solve in this photo ended up being 30.42 seconds.

Rubik's chicken

Check out this hilarious Rubik's chicken competition cartoon.

Bluetooth is cool

Peter just got a new laptop with bluetooth. This is cool because now I can connect to him wirelessly. I could do this before using IR, but bluetooth is cooler because it doesn't have to be line of sight. Excellent.

The iPAQ hx4705 has bluetooth

World Cube Association

Here's the website of the World Cube Association. When cubers talk about 'official' times, they mean times set at WCA recognised competitions.

All WCA recognised times can be found on the WCA world rankings page.

Average of 10: new personal best time

I siliconed my current favourite speedcube tonight and it was such a good idea. I broke my best average-of-10 by more than 2 seconds!

I was on the train, so instead of using Chris Hunt's JNetCube, I used CubeTimes2Go for scrambles and timing. CubeTimes2Go is a great little iPAQ cube application written by a speedcubing friend, Grant Tregay.

Here are the details:
Fastest: 22.29 seconds
Slowest: 38.11 seconds
Average: 31.14 seconds

I also got a new best lucky solve: 22.29 seconds.

Rubik's shoes

Check out these crazy Rubik's shoes! Someone recently posted this link on the speedcubing discussion forum. I expect I'll be seeing some of these shoes at the next Rubiks World Championships.