I am currently working on a new idea I had with my band Lest. We shot a few sequences with my digital movie camera, and I am currently mixing them to make a music video. This will help us to find more concert opportunities since we will send a movie link with our info sheets.

We had a great time setting up the lighting in our cavelike rehearsing room. We shot everything last wednesday evening and I started to work on the raw takes yesterday.

The main problem was to find a suitable software to edit all this. Most of digital montage software that I could use don’t allow to synchronize rushes easily. I decided to use Blender. Even if it is not it’s main target, it features a sequence editor which was really great and did fit my needs nicely.

Syncing images with music was the first tricky part. Took me hours to edit frame offsets to match exactly the music. I am currenly cutting the whole material to the final movie. I hope to post this here soon…

I’m ashamed because I have been neglecting most of my music/computing projects during the last weeks.

One of the main reasons is that I started to work on the Eternity II puzzle. This is basically a real puzzle game sold in a box. But what makes it different from common jigsaws is that there is a 2 million dollars prize for the first winner.

I like computing real-life problem solvers. I already did some for Rubiks cube, poker and other card games… So I started working on this the day I heard about it. In fact I think that it’d have tickled my geeky self even if there were no prize money…

I implemented a complete mouse-driven board editor which allows me to build any test model that I want. Then I implemented different solving strategies which are already able to solve board instantly up to 6×6 for now. The real model is a 16×16 square, so I still have a long way to go

Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t expect to solve the big board using brute force, I just implement a system that might find a solution in a decent time. But I will need a lot of karma for this !