Meme-Free Zone

Since I have a couple of spare SATA drives and most of my drive needs are for PATA, I thought I'd try a little SATA/PATA adapter.

Here's what it looks like compared to a normal drive:

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The problem, of course, is that the power supply connector is on the wrong side of the drive, which makes it pretty much useless if you're trying to fit it into a confined space such as an external drive housing with short cables.

And even if you aren't, the connector is upside down when used on a DVD drive. So if you want the drive the right way up, you have to somehow twist the cables through 180 degrees. There is NOT room to do this in e.g. an imac G4.

I've asked for a refund - I wonder how long it will take to get it.

later - 12 hours, and they told me to keep the converter. I suspect they've had other complaints.

In the absence of any clear skies I've been playing with the little QX7 microscope instead, using some image capture software I found on line. It's basically a toy and only 640 x 480 resolution, but the results aren't as bad as I expected. I've put some photos on line here

http://smg.photobucket.com/user/MarcusRowland/library/QX7?sort=9&page=1

I should point out that I'm pretty sure that this microscope's clained magnifications are actually area magnification, so the conversion to the usual linear scale is:

x10 is actually 3.1x
x60 is actually 7.75x
x200 is actually 14.1x

The bone in a couple of photos is whale bone, a slide from the 1920s, which is why you can actually make out some structure, the structure is BIG. The picture of the stamp marked UV was side-lit using a UV torch, which gives interesting results with fluorescent objects such as stamps.