There’s a fun post over at the MAKE blog about Liberty Puzzles.  Liberty Puzzles makes high quality wooden jigsaw puzzles that always have a few fun shaped pieces thrown in for good measure.

Jigsaw puzzle sites on the web are fairly common, but when I got an email from National Geographic asking me to check out the jigsaw puzzles on their site, I was immediately interested.  I’ve always equated National Geographic with fantastic photographs, so I was expecting to see some really great looking online jigsaw puzzles.  I wasn’t disappointed.  The jigsaw puzzles are in a section of the National Geographic site called “Your Shot” that features photos submitted by readers.  Editors then select among the submitted photos which will appear on the site.  The result is some pretty amazing pictures.

National Geographic has also clearly put some time into developing their jigsaw puzzle interface.  It’s what you would expect from a high quality online jigsaw program.  It’s easy to use and intuitive and there are options for adjusting difficulty.

If you like jigsaw puzzles, it’s worth checking out.  If only for the pictures.

It’s been a while since my last post, and I haven’t yet written anything about the launch of Eternity II.  The site is up and you can try a mini version of the puzzle there.  The makers seem to have learned their lesson from last time and there’s no possibility of the puzzle being solved too early.  Solution submission will only be checked beginning on Dec. 31, 2008.

In this day and age, it’s likely that we will know if someone solves the puzzle early, as the person will likely brag about it on the internet.  I’ll be curious to find out how the puzzle is solved once the solution is revealed.  No doubt, a final solution will be computer assisted like the last Eternity puzzle.  There’s already a site set up to try to rope other players into using their spare computer cycles to solve the problem with brute force (via Passion For Puzzles.)  As this guy will be keeping a full half of the prize money (with most contestants getting nothing,) I expect to see competitors in the near future.

The Golden Jigsaw is a puzzle competition that starts at 12 noon today.  The competition requires you to find 1,000 jigsaw puzzle pieces scattered around the web and assemble them.  The first to find and assemble all of the pieces will win $1,000,000.

Most of the pieces are, of course, located on the sites of paying advertisers, as this is how the prize money gets paid.  The final ten pieces will be located on charity websites.

Here’s a quick diversion from the news.  We all know that President Clinton is an avid cruciverbalist.  Well, President George W. Bush loves jigsaw puzzles.

I’ve come across a couple sites recently that feature metal puzzles which are really cool to look at even if they are expensive. The first site which I found through digg is Diabolical Puzzles which sells laser-cut stainless steel jigsaw puzzles. The second site, found through Passion for Puzzles, is Maxton’s Art Gallery. The metal puzzles featured on this site are amazing. Each is made from at least a dozen different metals. The cost for the puzzles is in the thousands of dollars, but it’s worth stopping by the site to look at the pictures.

Through the Funny Emails blog, I found a flash jigsaw puzzle where the image changes while you’re trying to assemble it.  This is a great idea even if this isn’t the best implementation.  The puzzle is extremely simple and the image is mostly blue sky.

I hope that someone is working on a better version.

The Express-Times in New Jersey has a story about a puzzle contest that was used to raise relief funds for a family whose home was destroyed in a fire.  The contest pitted 75 teams against each other to see who could be the first to complete a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle.

It’s great to see puzzles bringing people together… like the pieces of a puzzle.

I encountered two “world’s largest” puzzle stories today. One was about a crossword, the other was about a jigsaw puzzle.

Through Crossword Puzzle Links, I found a place where you can buy the “World’s Largest Crossword Puzzle” according to the Guiness Book of World Records. According to the site:

Breaking the 1996 Guinness record, this crossword hangs on a full seven feet by seven feet of wall space and has 28,000 clues for over 91,000 squares.

The second story was a BBC story about a man who completed what “could be the world’s largest commercially available jigsaw.” The puzzle was 10 and a half feet long and 5 feet wide.