The cover image is that of a fly eye made with a webcam that I had converted to a microscope. The eye facets cause diffraction and can be very colorful without a dye. But to be very honest, getting a sharp image at greater than 100 X magnification can be a little time consuming. This is the complete conversion of the webcam, one of the two methods covered in the video.
I will be posting some projects in the coming months that will be better understood and replicated with a microscope. But, I realized that many people do not have a microscope, or even have access to one. I know, because I have had mine for only two years and have had to improvise in the past. This conversion is the result of that improvisation. The older webcams failed to have a manual focus and literally had to be torn apart to be used as a microscope. But the current webcams, particularly the cheaper ones, are manually focused and work just fine. Please watch the video and I will follow the video with some links,  webcam information, and one more image from a screen shot. Enjoy!

This is a screen shot of a corn ear cell that was made with the de-focusing method which is fast and easy. You may have to fabricate a holder to steady the slide, but it is worth the effort.
The webcam that I used is a Gigaware 2500465, and it is available at Radio Shack and online. But any inexpensive webcam will work if it has a manual focus. One thing to consider is that the lenses on most webcams are plastic, not glass, so there may be some unwanted distortion. But, for the price, it is an acceptable trade-off.
The full conversion is available as an instructable by Zephyris, (Richard Wheeler.net) here. I appreciate his effort to provide good information for us all. It really is fun to look at the smaller side of life and to be surprised by the miniature world around us. Please comment or ask any questions and I will try to answer them for you... Ken.

This post may seem frivolous and unimportant and I have no desire to be trivial, but, rather to understand some of the odd behavior of materials around us. Some of the experiments that I do are complex and time consuming, and sometimes they end in dismal failure. But that is fine with me. I enter into most of my investigations with an open mind and I always learn something useful that will expand my knowledge base.
This simple demonstration took just an hour or so to do  but has explained something that I have observed for a long time but failed to try to understand before. I have seen that in all tubular pasta that the tubes always line up vertically and behave in the same way every time that I have cooked this type of pasta. And, as I mentioned in the video, I have given the question some thought. I even tried to make it more complicated than it really is. But, when cooked in a glass beaker, the behavior is much less mysterious. The tubes that remain horizontal seem to be either stuck to the bottom, or, are trapped by the weight of the upper tubes.Check out the video and comment as you see fit to. Now, what happens when we add milk, with a lot of fat content, to hot coffee? Maybe I will try this on a really rainy day. This post is for fun. Enjoy the world around us...