Monday, June 22, 2009

Make Natural Insect Repellent with Essential Oils [Outdoors] . If you live in a climate without many summer pests, well, lucky you. For the rest of us, these essential oil repellents will make patio life less insect-filled. Photo by mccun934. How-to-guide repository wikiHow explains the crafting of simple pest-banishing pots for your home and garden. You take a small rag or sponge, soak it with a diluted concentration of essential oils, then leave it in a small container like a glass jar. When you want to drive away mosquitoes, horse flies, and other annoying summer pests, you simply open the jar and place it near you to keep them away. If you don't have any small jars on hand, this is also a great project for the versatile Altoids tin. For details on the project, including which oils to use—mosquitoes hate peppermint apparently—check out the guide at the link below. If you find that a dose of peppermint isn't driving away the mosquitoes as quickly as you'd like, lure them away from you with a DIY mosquito trap. How to Make Natural Outdoor Fly Repellent with Essential Oils [Lifehacker] 11:44:31 AM     BookSeer Tells You Which Book to Read Next [Recommendations] . BookSeer is a simple web-based application that answers the question "What should I read next?" based on what you just finished, and presumably enjoyed, reading. Joining the ranks of other book recommendation tools like previously reviewed BookArmy, WhichBook, BookLamp, and What Should I Read Next?, BookSeer offers a simple interface and answer system. If you want to do some complex digging into your literary tastes with a variety of metrics you'll want a site like BookArmy. On the other hand with BookSeer you can plug in a book you enjoyed reading and it will return the top recommendations from book sources like Amazon.com and LibraryThing to suggest a list of books you might enjoy. Each book in the recommendation list is linked back to information from the source so you can dig down and read more about the books BookSeer is recommending. Have a favorite tool or technique for finding new books? Let's hear about it in the comments below. BookSeer [via MakeUseOf] [Lifehacker] 11:42:13 AM

© Copyright 2009 Jocelyn Shaw. Last update: 7/7/2009; 3:37:47 PM. Photo curtesy of Marjorie O'Brien