From what I've read they are harder since the rotation of the image could be wrong even if you get it back in the same position. With cubes having only solid colors on the faces, you don't have to worry about rotation, just color positions and orientations.

I guess you could confirm whether this is true or not by putting a regular (colors-only) Rubik's cube in the solved position and marking little arrows on the pieces pointing the same direction, then scramble and resolve it to see if the arrows end up not pointing the same directions even if the color positions/orientations are correct.

As for sales increasing, ticalc.org should really change their Nspire page to reflect the new developments. Otherwise, people will still think the Nspire "lacks programming ability".

Yep, updating those calc pages is on the to-do list. Right now we've been preparing to move ticalc.org to a new server, though, so we're kind of holding back on modifying the static content until then so the transition will be simpler. Thanks for bringing it up!

I learned and re-learned 3x3x3 Rubik's cube solving several times, except I would forget how whenever I hadn't played with one for too long and would have to relearn it. I think the main problem was due to my pretty much using sheer rote memorization of the needed move sequences. This time I'm trying a different approach of actually getting a better understanding of what makes the move sequences work the way they do (though this is hard because apparently I'm not very good at visualization—I just can't seem to focus on enough details at the same time, let alone while pieces are moving) and learn them more by what patterns/pieces should be caused by the moves. This seems to be working a lot better since it involves more intuition than memorizing.

So far I've only learned the layer-by-layer method. Apparently there are other methods which I'm planning on checking out at some point. I've also only worked with 2x2x2 and 3x3x3 cubes (my 2x2x2 is actually a ball rather than a cube but is functionally the same). I'd like to play with higher level cubes some day. I've seen those computer simulations of 4-D and even 5-D cubes. I can't imagine myself trying to solve one of those, though—I find it hard enough already mentally visualizing 3-D objects.

I remember once back around 1999–2000 when I brought a cube to high school to play with during free time. This was shortly after I finally figured out the instructions for solving and memorized the move sequences. Someone bet me $1 or $5 or something that I wouldn't be able to solve it. I started working on it for a while (at the time I was able to solve it eventually—I just wasn't too terribly efficient at it), but then I started thinking that I might get in trouble for not doing my work, so I put it down for a bit to do schoolwork. But then the teacher was like “Why are you stopping? There's money involved here!”, so I thought “Wha? Well, okay!” and got back to working on the Rubik's cube. When I solved it, the guy gave the money and said something like “I won't be betting against you anymore.”

I actually found this forum through Nikky, believe it or not. He and I had just gotten hired at ticalc.org and I had decided to begin work on splitting up various overgrown directories in the archives into additional categories. After a couple of weeks Nikky sent me an email saying it looked like people were noticing my work, with a link to a topic DJ Omnimaga posted about it. When I looked around, I saw a couple of calc-related topics and comments about ticalc.org that I was able to reply to so I registered and did that.

Until that point I hadn't really been aware of other calculator forums/sites besides the message boards on ticalc.org. Since activity there had been dwindling in recent years, I got the idea that I should look around for these forums and watch them for interesting calc topics as well as questions and feedback about ticalc.org that people often don't tell the staff directly (in the past it seemed that the ticalc.org staff usually didn't respond to public queries like this, and I felt it would be nice to change this). So this drew me toward spreading out and looking at other forums (and eventually IRC).

I think I remember Brandon saying a few times (unless I'm mixing this up with something else, which is possible) that you can work around that by unarchiving the variables and setting their folders, then archiving them back. Then the folder settings will be more permanent.

1 ) use output. Don't. Pxltext does the same thing with the same coordinates and you can show pictures to boot.

I don't see anything wrong with using Output if you only need to display text. This way you don't have to mess with graphing modes, saving/restoring GDBs, etc. I've only used Pxltext and graphics commands when actually using graphics.

You give some good pointers, though.

I kind of like the 68k BASIC better since it seems easier to me (I like being able to indent code and give variables descriptive names and so forth) and can do a lot of things that I wished I had back in my 82/85/86 BASIC days. It's not perfect, though, and I have lots of gripes about it after working with it for many years. And like others have said, it sucks that you can't use the whole screen. If the menus were optional like on the 86, the effective screen resolution would have been even better and you could eliminate the clutter of the inactive menu bar which might confuse users who are new to the calculator when they run your program.

That's odd, because I always considered the GBC as having the best, highest contrast of all non-backlit LCDs I know. To me it seemed like the old monochrome GBs had such hard-to-see, blurry screens by comparison.