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Before we bring the hate upon the Optimus keyboard, there is a bit of news that came about today. On December 12 Art.Lebedev will be accepting 103 pre-orders for the Optimus keyboard. The keyboards will ship “about May 2007″ and will have a price tag of… (are you ready for this?) … $1,200. Yes. Twelve hundred fucking dollars—pardon my French. It may be a joke by Artemy Lebedev, but regardless of the $1,200 price tag or not, the Optimus keyboard is heading in a downward spiral.

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[Via Gizmodo]

Canon’s PowerShot G7 doesn’t feature raw mode support and that upset quite a few people when it was released just a little while ago. We’ve also been wondering why Canon would seemingly go out of its way to not include a feature that many higher-end digital cameras just throw in nowadays. The official response from Canon is that by increasing the amount of megapixels in the camera, the amount of noise per pixel increased to such an extent that their was little difference in quality between JPEG compression and raw mode.

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[Via Gizmodo]

Normally, I hate concepts. Either things are research, or they are in production, don’t taunt me with things that aren’t real, or aren’t going to be real, real soon!

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[Via Coolest Gadgets]

Like sunbathing naked outdoors? Who doesn’t (especially Europeans). Just keep in mind that one day a satellite might fly by and capture your naked body for the good of posterity. Services like Google Maps and Google Earth have made satellite photography accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. This topless sunbather became an overnight Internet sensation, but she’s not alone. Apparently the Hague is overrun with naked and semi-naked Dutch people.

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[Via Coolest Gadgets]

Sure, we knew 4×4 was on the way, and we had an idea AMD was prepping a fancy new “Quad FX” moniker for the spankin’ new chipsets, but we were still waiting for the stamp of legitimacy, which just came in the form of an AMD unveil this morning in Japan. The new chipset integrates NVIDIA’s nForce 680a SLI chipset with AMD’s fresh Athlon 64 FX-70 dual-core processors to great effect, with clock speeds hitting 2.6, 2.8 and 3.0GHz for the FX-70, FX-72 and FX-74 processors. The 90nm chips include 2MB of L2 cache, consume no more than 125W of power, and can support 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM, all based on AMD’s Socket F workstation infrastructure. Of course, all this integrated action doesn’t come cheap — or tiny, as the picture above proves — since the CPUs will run you $599, $799 and $999 respectively. By the time you buy two of ‘em, plus 4 NVIDIA cards and a motherboard to hold ‘em all, your bank account will be hurting mightily, but if cost is no concern, there’s no arguing with the power potential here.

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[Via Engadget]

Photographer and lawyer, David Kimelberg, has a project that is rampantly after Needled’s heart: Inked Inc.

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[Via Needled]

“I discovered this while searching the ‘Net today. Make a rubber band powered helicopter out of a business card? Wow! This sounds simply fantastic!”

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[Via Make]

This maker made a huge real-life Google Earth pin point icon, if timed right it might even show up on the satellite photos!

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[Via Make]

“Hey Phil - I got the MAKE open source MP3 player kit and let me say I am impressed. I put it in an old Holga and its pretty rad. I am really impressed by the sound quality. On par with my ipod without a doubt. I am going to take it apart though. I’d like to make a case for it that looks like an old 1950s radio. Then use a BS2 plus PINK to control it via the web. And last use a tube amp for that 50s feel. That’s going to take a bit of time cause I have to order a tube amp kit.”

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[Via Make]

Here’s a accessory that could prove to be a fine enhancement to the upcoming holiday festivities: LiteCubes that light up your drink like a Christmas tree and have a gel center that you can freeze, cooling off that drink in cool style. They’re available in a variety of colors, each with an LED and battery embedded inside. Some of the LiteCubes, such as the green, blue, white and pink ones, required two batteries inside, rather than the single battery of the red, orange or gold ones.

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[Via Gizmodo]