T w e n t y S i d e d

Of all my puzzles, this is the only one I’ve never solved. In my defense, it’s hard to work with. It’s stiff and difficult to turn, and after a few minutes my fingers hurt from the effort. Not a very fun puzzle to experiment with.

On the other hand, it is very visually appealing. Lots of bright primary colors and a surface with just the right texture make it hard to resist picking the thing up.

Let’s be honest here: For anyone who’s been around bright and colorful infant toys, you know that many of them are attractive and amusing. It’s fun to pick them up and make them spin or beep or rotate or whatever it is the toy does. It isn’t any less fun to hold for an adult (although it’s not nearly as amazing or mysterious for us) but sensible adults (read: not me) shun them because you don’t want to get caught playing with a baby toy.

So a lot of the attraction of these puzzles is the same visual and tactile experience of the baby toy, along with the more cerebral process of solving a difficult puzzle. If you don’t believe me, just imagine how much less fun a Rubik’s Cube would be if it was made of wood and the sides were shades of grey, or simply numbered. The puzzle would still be there, but the “baby toy” appeal would be gone, and it would be much easier to put the thing down.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This morning was a new record: Ninety (90!!!) spam comments from one “person”. Amazing. His bot left comments on over half the posts on this site. My spam-filter caught them all and held them for moderation, but I still had to go through the list and make sure no real comments got caught in the net.

This is crazy. I’ve rejected every spam he’s fired at my site, and he (his bot) seems to respond by sending MORE. It seems like it would be in a spammer’s best interest to detect where their spam gets through and where it doesn’t, and to skip sites that block it. Wouldn’t this guy prefer to save his time and bandwidth for sites that are vulnerable?

Den Beste was nice enough to suggest .htaccess files as a way to deal with this, which is a very arcane form of black magic used to control Apache webservers. He warned that the config could be a little tricky. He was a not kidding. Even if Steve Wozniak and Harry Potter teamed up to help me, I don’t think I could get this working right. Sigh.

I said before that my web hosting service doesn’t let me block IP addresses. Look closely at the following image and see if you can spot the tool that might help me with this:

I’m an idiot. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. Particularly since I WAS LOOKING FOR IT. I can’t believe I’ve been manually sorting spam with this tool sitting there, unused.

So I blocked the offending IP’s, and I expect that will take a big, big bite out of the spam I have to look at every morning.

Jerks.

UPDATE: Looks like it really works. In the last 24 hours I’ve had to deal with 4 spam comments. So, about 98% of my spam was coming from the small group of IP’s I banned. Very satisfying.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Cubed

On the far left is a “Chex Cereal” branded cube. It’s not a a great cube because most squares are little fruit or cereal icons on a white background, which makes it a little more difficult to visually sort. It’s still an interesting and unique cube, though.

On top is a gimmick cube in which you can place pegs as part of some convoluted game. I no longer have the pegs, so now it’s just a strange cube. It’s made from solid colored plastic (as opposed to solid black plastic with stickers) which gives it a surprisingly different feel. I like it.

In the middle is my only real, original Rubik’s Cube. Sometime in 1991 I mentioned to someone that I knew how to solve them but I’d lost my cube, so I no longer owned one. They were no longer in stores (at least, not in any stores in my area) so I couldn’t get one. This guy challenged me, “You’ll never be able to solve mine. I’ve been messing with it for years and it’s never been solved.” He believed that the longer you mess with a cube the more “scrambled” it gets. This isn’t really true. Like shaking a jigsaw puzzle: messed up is messed up, and you can’t make it “extra” messed up by shaking it longer.

So: I bet him $5 vs. his cube that I could solve it in under 5 mins. I did it in 2 and won the cube. This is what prompted me to start collecting this stuff in the first place. This was a great deal. $5 was about half the price of a new cube, and this one was in great shape and already loosened up.

And just now as I type this I realize: This was the only time in my entire life I’ve ever bet anyone anything. I just never do it. It seems like a very agressive and pompus thing to do. In this case, I think I did it because I knew for a fact I would win (so it wasn’t really gambling) and because I didn’t have any other means for getting a Rubik’s cube. However, I still feel sort of like I took advantage of him by exploiting his lack of understanding of the thing. In my defense: He provoked me, and all but called me a liar.

On the far right is some sort of shape-changing cube I picked up in the mid-90’s. It was junk. The concept is great, but the thing was stiff and difficult to turn. Instead of “loosening” like most cubes over time this thing became tighter, until it was a chore to play with. (Perhaps some axle inside rusted? I have no idea what would cause this.) The pressure from my hands forcing it to turn eventually stripped off the stickers, and so my wife painted it. It looks cool, but by now it has more or less siezed up and is unusuable.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.