This thing looks sweet. Ok, I'll be the first to admit I have an electronics habit almost as bad as some people's drug habits. This thing looks so damn cool.

Each key is an LCD display, allowing you to display any image to any key. Really cool stuff.

For gaming, this is huge. You can customize the keys to display “run“ “shoot“ or whatever the game requires. This is cool for obscure game settings that are critical during play, but not used for the basic game play.

So a co-worker sent me an 'invitation' to install MSN Messenger 8.0 Beta. I have completely hated 7.5, I think the user interface is childish looking, and all of the 'extra' crap like winks, and nudges, etc. are totally stupid.

I'm glad I installed 8.0. I like the look of it, and there are some great new features. I can finally name my contacts what I want them to be! No more "captain kick" I can now name that person by their name... people change their screen names all the time, and I have to constantly click to see the email address to spark my memory of who someone is. The video is sweet. Sound, a little sketchy.

There are of course down sides. My first attempt at the new 'File Sharing' feature was seriously disapointing. Scott Hanselman and I were chatting via MSN video and voice, and all of that data was working relatively well. He sent me a photo of his new son, and it chugged along for a couple of minutes. Scott's comment was, “man the video is coming accross fine, why can't the file transfer work better?“ I totally agree.

The advertising seems a bit more exageratted in the main IM client window. I like the fact that Google Talk, and Skype don't do this.

Another cool thing is you can add notes, and key search words for contacts. So if you have a friend that is a co-worker, you can add a keyword called work and friend to each contact. You can then search for a term, showing all the contacts that matc. Kind of a hack I suppose, but still nice.

I have invites, so if you would like to try it out, post a comment and I'll send you one, I'll need your email address.

Ok, this looks pretty darned cool, using “Festoon“ you can add video to Google Talk, and Skype! I just picked up a new Logitech webcam, and I'm very impressed w/ the quality and advancement of this unit as compared to one I owned a few years ago.

It's 1.3 Megapixels, and while by no means studio quality, it's pretty darned good. It has some cool features too, like face tracking, the camera will automatically adjust to track your face during use (if you want it to). This is nice because you can talk more naturally, and you don't have to keep your head within the camera's field.

I have not yet had the opportunity to try festoon, as I need to get someone else to install it on their version of Google Talk or Skype, but once I do, I'll edit this post. Somebody instal this w/ Skype, or Google, and let me know.

UPDATE:

I used Google Talk and Festoon w/ a friend last night. It worked relatively well. I had spent about 20 minutes w/ another friend trying to get crappy MSN video chat to work, and the audio just was not working w/ MSN. A quick call on skype confirmed that both of us had our audio working, so not sure what's up w/ that.

The Festoon software even includes a bandwidth usage meter, kind of nice to see what is happening when sending and receiving video/audio. I'm impressed for a beta. When this goes out of beta into it's 1.0 launch, I think it will be very solid.

The downside, both parties have to have the software installed, but I guess if it works, it's not that big of a downer. Unlike the crappy MSN client, and all of the stupid winking, nudging, and flash like features that can be purely defined as annoyanceware, festoon is simple, and simply works.

Give it a try!