Hasta La Gadget!

Happy Birthday to one of the most frustrating puzzles ever invented. Most people can’t even solve the thing without cheating via the solution book or, now a days, YouTube.

The Rubiks Cube was designed by Erno Rubik and was originally meant to be a learning tool to help explain 3 dimensional geometry. When he turned all the pieces, it ended up taking him a month solve it. It was in 1979 that he took the cube to a toy fair in Nuremberg, Germany when it was bought and licensed.

In celebration of the big event, the Google Doodle is a Rubik’s cube. If you thought the original hand held one was hard to solve, try their version.

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then this set of Tangram puzzle sticky notes let you leave a longer message than you could ever fit on a single Post-it note. The collection of angular shapes can be arranged into almost any shape you can think of, although a drop or two of artistic talent will certainly help.

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If you’ve solved a Rubik’s Cube so many times that it no longer offers you a challenge, maybe it’s time to try a new shape? The Marusenko Sphere puts 54 spinning and sliding pieces into a globe-shaped puzzle that comes in five different levels of difficulty.

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To commemorate the 100th anniversary of its classic camera, the Leica store in Sao Paulo, Brazil commissioned this wonderful puzzle that would be given to important clients throughout the year. The non-functional camera, designed by ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi in Brazil, would be distributed as a full-sized poster with pre-cut parts that could be popped out and assembled into the faux Leica you see above.

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Most of the videos you can find of Rubik’s Cube-manipulating robots are purpose-built to solve the puzzle in record time. But Baxter, designed as an affordable and easy-to-teach replacement for assembly line workers, isn’t designed for any specific task. And that’s what makes watching him solve a cube even more impressive.

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