Yeah. It's a week early.

I just found a really cool applet mod for my G15 gaming keyboard.

If you are wondering, the keyboard totally rocks and is the best keyboard I've even owned. It's well worth the money and I've thought about spending money out of my own pocket to buy one or two more just to use at work. (I did that for the Logitech MX518 gaming mice. I've got mice at home and work).

As you can see in the picture, the G15 comes with an LCD display panel. But, I didn't buy this $100 keyboard for the LCD display. I bought it because of the backlit keys and the 18 G (function) keys (each with 3 different settings). I find them very useful for typing in dark rooms or running macros (quickly adminning video game servers, launching applications, or entering custom text).

But, the LCD display is kind of cool. It can display in-game information from several popular games. I'm using it to display CPU usages, Xfire messages, FRAPs, Winamp, clocks, and so on.

I just installed "SirReal's multipurpose G15 plugin [v2.4]". This applet consolidates several LCD display screens into one.

Here are the features:

Features:

* Customizable display of weekday, date and time.
* Shows number of unread mails as icons (max 5) (if your mail client supports it)
* Displays CPU usage (supports up to four CPU's, both Intel and AMD).
* Shows the memory load.
* Shows inbound (top) and outbound (bottom) network traffic volume
* Shows network inbound/outbound network load over the last ten seconds, and/or total data sent and received.
* World clock with daylight savings support and user selectable time zones
* Speaker switcher, switch between speakers and headphones with a click
* Displays sound volume and speakers muted status
* Stopwatch with lap time (click to start/lap, long-click to reset/stop)
* TeamSpeak2 integration: Shows speakers, player count (channel with large font, server with small font), arriving and leaving players, mic mute status, self speaking status, channel changes. Click to mute/unmute mic. Long-click to show who's in the active channel.
* WinAMP integration: Shows new song name when song changes. Shows remaining play time and average bitrate. Click to re-display current song.
* Foobar2000: supports the WinAMP spam component.
* FRAPS integration: Shows the current FPS.
* SpeedFan integration: Shows user selectable values from SpeedFan (temperatures, fan speeds, voltages).
* iTunes integration: Shows new song name when song changes. Shows remaining play time and average bitrate. Click to re-display current song.

Major League Gaming signed 5 players to 3-year $250K contracts. That averages out to near $83K per year for each player for 36 months. These players basically become salaried employees of MLG with responsibilities other than gaming, like press and media events. (source)

DirecTV will broadcast 2006 Cyberathlete Professional League events. This is major news as the leading digital television provider is showing interest in beaming these events to viewers around the world. Look for the Winter CPL event to be shown in late December 2006. (source) Console gamers are starting to use "the claw", a way of holding an XBOX controller.

The claw is a way to use 3 fingers on one hand to input commands on a controller. It appears to me that this is a sign that console gamers want more input options. I think it's a matter of time before we see console gamers using keyboards and mice as input devices. More of that later. (source)