light thanks

Hello and welcome to our new recurring video feature--the PopSci 5-Minute Project. In every issue of the magazine, we highlight a quick and easy project that anyone could tackle in the time it takes to, well, read this blog post. We'll be expanding our favorites here into handy instructional video form here on the How 2.0 blog, showing you first-hand how to build some seriously useful stuff—and it's so easy, even the clumsiest of the clumsy can succeed. To prove that point, the PopSci 5 team is made up of editors from all walks of the DIY circle—from How 2.0 editor Mike Haney (who definitely knows his way around a soldering iron) all the way down the spectrum to folks rating fairly low on the handiness spectrum (like yours truly). If we can do it, so can you! And you don't even need a custom PopSci jumpsuit (although it definitely helps). Yes, we wear them around the office all the time.

First up is PopSci's deputy editor Jake Ward and the bottle cap tripod. When we first spotted this over on Jake Ludington's MediaBlab blog, we were hooked—such an easy and inexpensive way to utilize the often-overlooked tripod mount on the bottom of your digital point-and-shoot to take beautiful, rock-solid shots in low light (thanks Jake!). So check out our video how-to above, and stay tuned right here for more 5-Minute Project videos rolling out in the coming days. —John Mahoney