Small Time

I picked up a nifty little gadget a number of years back - an Intel-branded USB microscope. I only found out about it and bought it when they had already stopped selling it and had abandoned that market. A handful of places still had stock and were selling them at fire-sale prices. It became such a popular item after Intel abandoned it and the prices had dropped, that the prices went back up and it was later resurrected by a different company. It wasn't advertised as Mac compatible, but a resourceful programmer created a nice program that made it work great on the Mac. Rather than looking through an eyepiece, you see the image on your computer screen and can control the microscope from the computer (with the exception of magnification and focusing, which is done manually). You can turn overhead and underneath lighting on an off. You can take snapshots, record movies, etc. It has three magnification levels, 10x, 60x and 200x. Being low-speed USB based, it's pretty slow and so you have to adjust focus slowly because the image on your screen lags behind your actions, but it's still quite fun and it is indeed a real microscope. The software even lets you set up a "web cam" using it. Maybe we'll take it with us to Iowa and have a microscope-cam for all to view while we're there....

I got the microscope out, of course, because I thought Max would like it, and he does. Not only does he like the microscope, but he really loves the little plastic collection jars, tweezers and bulb-sucker thingy for collecting specimens that came with it, probably more than the microscope itself. He was very excited when I told him he could keep them. He put them on his bedside table last night, and is planning to collect some things today to look at under the microscope. It also came with some sample slides containing various things to look at. We looked at shrimp eggs and some wierd looking bug. We also looked at some things we had in and around the house - we looked at a slice of green pepper and a slice of carrot. Max went out to our walkway and picked up some small stones to look at with it. Of course Max is really into taking pictures with it. I told him we need to get a sample of pond water to look at as we should see microscopic living creatures in it, good for making videos with, so hopefully we'll find time soon to go to a pond and do that. It didn't come with real microscope slides (other than the ones with things already permanently in them), so we'll have to go to an education store and pick some up.

If Saturn does crash into the tub any time soon, Max will be there, with plastic tweezers and specimin jars in hand.