Environment

There is never a shortage of air fresheners out there that perfume the air, at least temporarily.  However, none really last.  Then you can have something that sprays the air on a regular basis, but those are just air fresheners on a timer really.  Well this does things a little differently, it’s more like the devices you’d find in casinos and the nicer hotels out there.  It does things a little more subtly and the clean scent sticks around far longer, which is definitely a plus if you have indoor pets.

Mr. Dude note:  We lived in a house that got an ice dam once. It was awful!  When we got a new roof, I doubled the amount of waterproof felt that goes along the bottom edge of the roof.  Best decision I ever made.  Low cost, and protects so much!

If you want us to post other home fix it stuff we've discovered over the years, drop us a line, and we'll be sure to put it up here.

Taking the time to run through some pre-winter preparation now, can save you from costly and difficult repairs during the winter months. Use this handy checklist to make sure your home is in order before the cold weather comes.

Kiplinger's, the financial magazine, put together a list of checks and repairs that are best completed when the weather is still fair and the hassle-factor of completing them low. One area you certainly don't want to neglect is your roof and gutters. Get out there and check for damaged shingles and overflowing gutters. Once snow is piled high, repairing a leak or de-icing the gutters to clean them and tame an ice dam will be a risky and potentially expensive task.

Not a fan of paper clips? Wish your stapler had an infinite supply of staples? The Paper Fix is a stapler-substitute that binds paper together using just the paper itself.

Years ago I had a Japanese student who would turn in his papers "stapled" by a tiny perforation in the corner of the pile with a ribbon of the paper itself hooking them all together. He had brought the device from Japan and I was never able to locate one in the United States. Over at the CoolTools blog, they found one years ago in Germany—apparently every other country gets cooler office gadgets than the U.S.—and just recently found a version for sale here in the US.

A startup with a secret recipe for printing cheap solar cells on aluminum foil debuted today, in what could end up a milestone for the industry.

Nanosolar’s technology consists of sandwiches of copper, indium, gallium and selenide (CIGS) that are 100 times thinner than the silicon solar cells that dominate the solar photovoltaics market. Its potential convinced Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to back the company as angel investors in its early days.

Exposing ourselves to traditional Japanese aesthetic ideas — notions that may seem quite foreign to most of us — is a good exercise in lateral thinking, a term coined by Edward de Bono in 1967. "Lateral Thinking is for changing concepts and perception," says de Bono. Beginning to think about design by exploring the tenets of the Zen aesthetic may not be an example of Lateral Thinking in the strict sense, but doing so is a good exercise in stretching ourselves and really beginning to think differently about visuals and design in our everyday professional lives. The principles of Zen aesthetics found in the art of the traditional Japanese garden, for example, have many lessons for us, though they are unknown to most people. The principles are interconnected and overlap; it's not possible to simply put the ideas in separate boxes. Thankfully, Patrick Lennox Tierney (a recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun in 2007) has a few short essays elaborating on the concepts. Below are just seven design-related principles (there are more) that govern the aesthetics of the Japanese garden and other art forms in Japan. Perhaps they will stimulate your creativity or get you thinking in a new way about your own design-related challenges.

Here's a prediction of how land is going to change as oceans rise over the years. A tipster helpfully points out a submerged Greenpoint, thus relegating serious contingencies of Brooklyn's hipsters to a Waterworld-like existence.