English

I'm now the proud owner of a Logitech G15 Gaming keyboard. And yes, it's just as cool as it looks, even though I use the display more for sysinfo and calendar than actual gaming. Having to move your eyes from your screen to the LCD display during gaming just doesn't work out that well in real life. Thanks to LCDStudio you can customize your own displays, with all the info you'll ever need!

A big catch is that the keyboard for some reason isn't available with norwegian layout. It is, however, available in swedish. But because of this, the swedish versions are extremely difficult to come by. I guess Logitech didn't anticipate that norwegians would throw themselves over the swedish version aswell. Well, it's so cool, you can't help it!

But since the swedish version was so hard to find I ended up buying an english version together with some keyboard stickers from WorldLanguage.com with norwegian characters. But after using the keyboard for a couple of hours I did a horrible discovery! The difference between 101 and 102 keys keyboards... Since scandinavian languages have 3 letters more than english (and these must be available both as upper- and lower-case), these keyboards have an extra key. Thanks to some reorganizing the key is located between the left shift key and the Z key. This extra key contains the < and > symbols. As a webdeveloper, I was not amused. After trying desperately to program the macro keys to provide me with the missing key I figured out that the macro keys can only emulate keypresses from other keys on the keyboard, so that plan clearly did not work.

And the solution? Well, by downloading Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creater (no link, because MS requires WGA validation for the download) and using the accessibility on-screen keyboard in Windows (which let me switch to a 102 keys virtual keyboard) I managed to create my own layout! Since I had both curly and square braces on altgr 7 through 0 I decided to "outline" them with the missing symbols. So they're located at altgr - 6 (less than) and altgr - (greater than). This also made it possible to add them to the macro keys easily. So here you go, a 101-key keyboard layout in norwegian called N-101.msi!

After installing it, you can go to control panel, regional and language options, languages, text services and input languages, details, add the new layout and set it as default. While you're there, it's always a good tip to remove any languages you don't use. And voila!