Ah, the alluring glow of the LED light. Whether you're looking to create a bit of romantic (albeit extremely geeky) ambiance, or you just want to have some extra emergency lighting around the house, a set of mini LED candles is a great thing to have. They also happen to be quick, easy, and cheap to make yourself. In this video, executive editor Mike Haney demonstrates how to do it.

If you're anything like us, you were the type of kid who took apart dad's
new radio just to see what was inside. That kind of curiosity never dies,
which is why How 2.0, PopSci's award-winning home for the coolest
tips, tricks, hacks and do-it-yourself projects, wants to see what today's
tech tinkerers are up to.

Have you built something amazing you'd like to
show off? Tried a How 2.0 project and failed miserably? Blown something up
with the kids' chemistry set? If you've invented it, tweaked it, hacked it,

Dept.: DIY
Tech: Hand-built portable games
Cost: $150–$400
Time: 18 hours
Practical | | | | | Popcorn

Dept.: Tech Lesson
Tech: Tape to DVD conversion
Base Cost: $100 to $500
Time: A few hours
Dabbler | | | | | Master

A: One critical difference between the Web and TV is how they scale. TV scales nicely—it costs the same to air a show to 10 viewers as it does to a million. On the Web, distributing a file to a million users at once is nearly a million times as costly (and slower) as delivering it to one.


BitTorrent, an open-source peer-to-peer parallel downloading tool written by Bram Cohen, changes the equation: The more popular a file is, the easier it becomes to fetch and the cheaper it becomes to serve.

Dept.: Gray Matter
Element: Magnetite
Project: Collecting, purifying magnetite; making magnetic field lines
Cost: Free
Time: 30 minutes
Dabbler | | | | | Master