Very sad...

...to hear this evening that John Moores has passed away. 

Having met him in Washington for the first time we shared a common appreciation of Jane Kostick's wonderful work - she'd told us to look out for one another because she thought it was kind of neat that two of her new fans from another continent would be attending the same puzzle meeting in DC.

It was brilliant to have John join a few of us on a puzzle hunt and see him find a new version of one of his Karakuri puzzles in a Tokyo department store and happily add it to his collection. 

...and seeing him in London was truly bitter sweet - we could all see he was struggling, but enjoying being there and getting a huge kick out of taking part in the Exchange - it was exhausting for those of us in good health...

I'd like to think that Big Ben was a way to say Thank You to his puzzling friends - a little something to remember his joy in puzzling. 

So long John... 

...my thoughts are with all your friends and family everywhere. 

Thank YOU.

It’s all Angus’ fault

[You’re off the hook this time Oli!]

Back at the end of November Angus Lavery posted a pic of his latest impossible object – an earbud cube…

Now having had a limited amount of success with some matchstick cubes a little while back I decided to have a bash at making an earbud cube as well … I reckoned that it should be a bit easier than the matchstick cubes in at least one sense – there were thicker bits at both ends and I reckoned that would probably help with getting the right degree of tension set up in there…

So I duly added a few boxes of earbuds to my next shop at Sainsburys (Yes, I got some very strange looks!) and set about having a go at producing one just before Christmas. 

The ground-rules for these objects are simple – you only get to use the objects themselves in the final construction – no glue or threads or Blue-Tac – just the earbuds.

Now the earbuds may well have thicker bits at both ends, but they’re rather light little things and you need to be careful not to sneeze or breathe too heavily when you’re working on them… 

I followed more-or-less the same approach as I had for the matchstick cubes but as I was worried about keeping the first layer in place, I used a sacrificial piece of masking tape sticky side up on the desk to keep the first nine buds in place… working my way up to virtually full height didn’t take very long and I found that the buds tended to stay where I wanted them rather nicely – so perhaps the masking tape wasn’t necessary after all. 

When it came to lifting the cube and compressing it I found that getting it off the tape was quite a delicate procedure, especially while you’re handling around a hundred odd earbuds loosely assembled into a cube, trying desperately not to waste the last hour’s careful stacking and cajoling. If I make another I suspect I’ll pass on the masking tape…

Building the structure outwards once it’s been properly compressed a couple of times was pretty straight-forward and the structure turns out to be quite forgiving – I found I had a side that wasn’t square so had to effectively remove and replace it in-situ and things help up fine… 

Filling in the sides once the outlines of the cube were done was pretty therapeutic, knowing that the hard work and the risky bits were effectively all done by then… and the end-result after an hour or so’s fiddling – an earbud cube to go on the shelf next to the matchstick cubes from a little while back – success! 

…and thanks Angus for posting that pic and reminding me to have a bash at making one! 

___________________________

On a related theme … I got to meet Sándor Bozóki at IPP34 -  Sándor is one of the leading lights when it comes to matchstick cubes and the like – he not only makes impressive looking matchstick cubes, but he puts them inside bottles as well … and yes, he does them properly! No glue, just matches …

Sándor had a bunch of his pin cubes available for sale at the puzzle party so I picked up two of them… 

Now even though these pin cubes do use adhesive to get them going, they’re still very impressive pieces of patience and engineering … the smaller of the two is made up of 267 11mm pins whilst the larger of the two comprises around 2200 34mm pins … lovely little objects for the shelf of impossibility. 

Results!!

Right, you've had a week to play along, and I've had a few entries, so here are the results: 

Special mention to Will Hu for getting the very first entry in, and if he'd had them all right, this game would have ended at 9:31 on Christmas Eve... but he was missing a couple so the game continued. Will made a couple of very good guesses at some of the ones he didn't recognise, including a memorable one that had him describing one of the puzzles as a disentanglement puzzle that looked like a paper clip ... yip, it's called Paper Clip - of course if he'd randomly guessed the designers as Pevnitskiy & Grebnev I'd have been highly impressed. Will also helpfully suggested a copy of Big Ben as a prize... not quite the level of generosity I was aiming for!

Having had a few entries over the course of the week, I decided that New Year's Day was as good a time to call a halt on it and put you out of your collective misery...

As I'd asked for the puzzle's names and for their designers, and there were 50 puzzles pictured (no, I wasn't lying... the pic of Fauler Hund on the left included the frame - that wasn't a copy of Confetto or something similar lurking in the wings to trap you ... would I?!). So one point for each gives me a neat score out of 100...
 
Will (H), Markus and Niko came in at just under 80 apiece - an entirely creditable performance! Well done and thanks for playing! But no prizes...

Goetz' entry consisted of a copy of my collage with the names and designers typed over the top of each picture - easily the easiest to score, but a couple of blank spots meant a score of 87...

Yvon eventually managed to find my surname to work out my email address and submitted an 89% correct solution missing a couple of designers and getting tripped up along with a bunch of others on Betty's Baffling Bracelet. [I was a bit meaner this year - in the past I've only used pics from my blog ... this year it was any pics I'd taken this year, and quite a few of them haven't featured on my blog...] 

Chris went one better and hit 90 while last year's champ, Steve, scored a whopping 95 - Steve's one of the few folks who was able to list "me" under the designers column and took advantage of that!

This year nobody could touch Nick Baxter, who scored 98 on my nit-picking mark-o-meter. If you're interested he had a misplaced "Cube" and a missing "Box" in his answers so he had "Chequered" and "Ferris' Cube" for numbers 20 and 23... and he taught me that Keith Winegar designed the 4-piece Jigsaw we all recognise - Wil Strijbos' version being the bottom right pic on my collage. Without his entry I'd have been scoring that one wrong!

Thanks for playing along - hope it provided a few minutes amusement and I'll be procuring something puzzling and winging it over to Nick in the next few days...

Happy 2015 - may it be suitably puzzling! 

allard

The complete list of puzzles and designers: 

1	Cubes in Space	Iwahiro
2	Crosslinks	Toulouzas
3	Tripod	Nicholls
4	Egg	Strijbos
5	Illusion	Toulouzas
6	Bishop	Gillen
7	Ladybird	Louage
8	Coast to Coast	Grabarchuk
9	Snowball	Yarger
10	New Pony Puzzle	Uyematsu
11	Caramel Box	Uyematsu/Hashimoto
12	The Kray Twins	Nicholls
13	Join the Club	Elliott
14	Tel Arad	Meron
15	Pirate's Wallet Puzzlebox	Yarger
16	Fauler Hund	Constantin
17	Alles Schiebung	Constantin
18	Total Eclipse	Coffin
19	All-Edges Coverage	Iwahiro
20	Chequered Cube	Hutchison
21	It’s Nuts	Elliott
22	Katie Koala	Young
23	Ferris' Box	Wiltshire
24	7-4-2	Pauwels
25	The Circle	Hales
26	Pin-N-Nut	Chiaro
27	Paper Clip	Pevnitskiy/Grebnev
28	Droid	Baumegger
29	Cross & Crown 2013	Burbank
30	Ball Puzzle	Perry
31	No. 12 Puzzlebox (Cross Box)	Yarger
32	Waterfall Box #5	Sound (nee Schaefer)
33	Minotaur's Burr	Potts
34	Big Ben Exchange	Moores, Young & Yananose
35	The Gouge Packing Puzzle	Gouge
36	Four to Square	Haubrich
37	Tricklock T9	Popp
38	Twin-Lens Reflex Camera	Kawashima
39	Puzzlerone	von Kaenel
40	The Golden Ratio Box	Wiltshire
41	Square Dissection	Baxter
42	Tube it In	Strijbos
43	Extreme Torture	de Vreugd
44	K-419	Klobucher
45	Rhombic Maze Burr	Bosch
46	Betty's Baffling Bracelet	Gee
47	Cast Galaxy	Cohen
48	Hinomaru: The Japanese Flag Puzzle	Curtis
49	Doors and Drawers	Toulouzas
50	Four-piece Jigsaw Puzzle	Winegar

Walker's Christmas Challenge 2014

Having been recently reminded (thank-you anonymous!) that I usually put up a bit of a competition at this time of the year, I have put a little collage of puzzley pics together for your festive amusement. 

I think there are 50 recognisable puzzles in the collage, mostly featured on my blog, although some haven't... but if you're a serious puzzlist, you'll recognise them too! 

If you email me a list of puzzle names and designers and you're either the first with full marks or the one with the highest number correct, I'll spot you a puzzling prize. [Mental note - buy a prize from Wil!] 

My email address is my firstname dot surname at gmail dot com. 

Click on the pic for a full size version...

...and Merry Christmas and Happy 2015 

to all my puzzling mates around the world!

Brian's Stickman Reproductions

Brian Pletcher, the original puzzling super-blogger, has been jolly industrious recently. He challenged himself to produce 3D printed versions of a pair of Robert Yarger’s iconic puzzleboxes. You can read his story over here.

A couple of my mates had bought copies of the Borg Box from Brian and some of the guys on the puzzle forums were raving about them. I’d pretty much decided to get myself one when George Bell put up a photo of his colourfully dyed copy and that absolutely sealed it for me … and with the looming Shapeways price increases I managed to squeeze in an order just before they virtually doubled in price. 

Brian being a rather generous soul ended up tossing in a free copy of his version of the Snowflake as well and a couple of weeks later a pair of rather stunning little reproductions arrived in Barnt Green. 

Now in the interim, my mate Adin (the origami-guru and designer of evil exchange puzzles) had also bagged copy from Brian and was planning on dying it so it wouldn’t be plain Shapeways white (albeit strong and flexible!).  Thinking that tossing an extra set of pieces in the pot wouldn’t be a lot of extra bother, I asked if he’d mind adding mine to the brew and he readily agreed…. Only, a few days later he’d put up some pics of his copy resplendent in glorious Technicolor and I hadn’t even dropped my white bits off at his place yet… so much for not much extra bother. 

Long story short, Adin merrily dyed my copy a couple of weeks later and then dropped off a set of colour-coded bags of bits when he and Sophie came round for a day’s puzzling… along with a few other puzzlers. 

So while Adin and Chris were both still there, I tipped all the bits onto the dining room table and set about trying to work out how the heck to put this puzzle together – remember Stickman himself charges a hefty assembly fee to anyone who takes their full-size copy apart and can’t get it back together again themselves. 

The only time my original copy has been apart was in the hands of my expert puzzle-solving mate Louis – and even then he took one panel apart at a time and kept the pieces neatly laid out in order… 

I was faced with a  pile of scrambled bits – and even with the full-size copy next to me for inspiration (and reference) I really struggled to even start to see how it went together… With a lot of encouragement and advice from Chris, I managed to make a bit of a start but we had to call on Adin for some help once we had the panels more or less together... at which point we realised some of the locking mechanisms needed to be reversed in order to get the panels to actually go together. 

It must have taken well over an hour to finally get the little marvel assembled and locked up… so now whenever anyone opens my Borg Box, they will find a rather colourful little 3D-printed miniature version inside it… :-) ...and when they open that copy... it's empty... but wouldn't that be pretty cool... turtles!

…and since Brian had sent me a copy of Snowflake as well, and it just so happens to fit perfectly inside my Snowball, anyone opening my copy of the Snowball will find a neatly nesting copy of Snowflake inside that as well!

Thanks to Brian to letting me get a copy before Shapeways’ prices went skywards and for tossing in the Snowflake as well – and a huge THANK YOU to Adin for boiling some colour into my little Borg Box – it looks brilliant!