Whether you're hiking, barbecuing, or just rough-housing outdoors, this is the time of year for cuts and blisters. If you can't find a bandage, a dab of super glue will do in a pinch.

After you've cleaned the wound and stopped any bleeding, apply a very small amount of super glue to the area and quickly spread it around before it dries. The glue will harden into a mesh that essentially acts as replacement skin until your body is able to heal itself. Super glue is non-toxic, but it might cause some minor skin irritation, and takes a long time to come off, so it's probably best to only use this trick for small wounds and if no proper bandages are available.

This trick is fairly well-known, but it bears repeating as summer begins and everyone starts heading outside.

Photo by Mahedewan

A quick search on Google will bring up countless ways to make DIY speakers (or volume boosting amps) for a smartphone. From a paper cup to a glass jar, nearly all of these will give you some extra volume, but which ones work best? We decided to test out a few of the most popular tricks.

To test the volume, we're using the not-entirely-scientific iPad app Decibel Meter Pro to check sound levels from an iPhone 4S's speaker. We'll also use the same song for each method, The Beatles "Helter Skelter" since it starts out nice and loud with the peak around the 12 second mark. Each different amp had its sound directed at the iPad as best as possible.

The average decibel level in the room prior to playing music was 51. With that, let's take a look at the results.

No Amp

Our first test was just the iPhone sitting with no amp on a tabletop. This result of a decibel level of 59 will be our baseline for the amps from here on out.

Decibel Level: 59
Decibel Change: +8
Sound Quality: Poor. Lots of highs and no lows.

Headphones into Paper Cups

We've walked you through this method before. It's essentially shoving a set of earbuds into a paper cup.

Decibel Level: 53
Decibel Change: -6
Sound Quality: Okay. The volume is lower, but the stereo sound provides a nice effect provided you have a quiet place to listen.

Ceramic Cup

The most common variation on the smartphone DIY amp is to place it in some sort of cup. We tested glass and ceramic, but plastic is known to do well too. Here's how the ceramic cup did.

Decibel Level: 60
Decibel Change: +1
Sound Quality: Good. It didn't pick up a lot of volume, but the sound quality increased and made it more clear.

Toilet Paper Roll

We've heard the toilet paper roll doesn't do much good but we decided to try it our for ourselves. As it turns out it kind of stinks.

Decibel Level: 63
Decibel Change: +4
Sound Quality: Poor. Not matter how we shaped the toilet paper roll we couldn't get the music to sound better than when there wasn't an amp at all.

Rolled Up Paper

A rolled up sheet of paper as an amplifier is one of the easiest and most common tricks. You'll get louder sound from a longer roll, but we used one sheet of letter size paper.

Decibel Level: 64
Decibel Change: +5
Sound Quality: Good. Lows sounded better than no amp and the highs seemed to carry further.

Cereal Bowl

Another one of the old tricks is to stick your smartphone into a ceramic cereal bowl. The shape of a bowl supposedly creates a nice little volume boost.

Decibel Level: 64
Decibel Change: +5
Sound Quality: Okay. Some rattling kept the lows from sounding good, but the sound carried far.

Glass Cup

When we covered the smartphone in a glass jar tip before we talked about it as a way to boost your alarm clock sound. It only makes sense it'd be worth trying out for music too.

Decibel Level: 67
Decibel Change: +8
Sound Quality: Poor. It was louder, but the two different glasses we tested it with created an echo effect that was hard to ignore.

Make-Shift Cardboard Amp

When I last worked in an office I only had an ancient PC with a barely functional copy of Windows XP installed on it and no music player. This cardboard construction was my solution. I figured I'd introduce it into the test to see how it faired. It's an oatmeal box cut to fit around the iPhone and project the sound.

Decibel Level: 67
Decibel Change: +8
Sound Quality: Good. The sound quality doesn't change much but it carries well across the room and kept a good mix of the highs and lows.

Paper Cup

37 Signals programmer Sam Stephenson posted the coffee cup as iPhone amp a while back. It might not seem like paper would boost volume better than the other methods, but it ended up being the loudest in our tests and sounds good.

Decibel Level: 72
Decibel Change: +13
Sound Quality: Good. The paper cup was not only the loudest it also sounded the best regardless of where we were in the room. Quality was on par with non-powered speakers I've heard.

As we noted at the beginning, this isn't exactly the most scientific test in the world and your mileage may vary. For our conditions the paper cup was not just the loudest, but also the best sounding. None of these methods make listening to music great but they do offer a boost so you can hear better.

We've seen quite a few of these tricks over the years so if we missed your favorite method sound off in the comments. If you want to test and post your own results, please do.

If you're a heavy sleeper and have trouble waking up in the morning to your phone's alarm, Redditor tribalwombat discovered you can boost its volume by sticking it in a drinking glass.

This works because the sound will reverberate inside the glass. It may not be the world's most pleasant amplification technique, but it works great for an alarm. On top of that, to turn the alarm off you have to actually pull the phone out of the drinking glass. This makes it a bit tougher and makes it just a little more likely that you'll have to get out of bed.

LPT: Heavy sleeper? Tired of snoozing past your alarm? Use the 'smartphone in a cup' trick to crank the volume! | Reddit

You might already have a 72-hour disaster kit or even a longer-term Doomsday survival kit, but what if you're caught at work when disaster strikes? If you don't already have one, create a survival kit that will help you get home from work and keep you safe for at least 24-hours.

Why do you need a Get Home Bag (GHB)? Most of us spend more time away from home than at home, and as The Art of Manliness points out, "just getting home can be a survival journey in and of itself"—whether the disaster is caused by severe weather, a blackout, terrorist attack, or other event.

Creek Stewart, author of Build the Perfect Bug Out Bag: Your 72-Hour Disaster Survival Kit, outlines all the supplies he keeps in his GHB. Not surprisingly, these include water, energy bars, and a multi-tool. Some items you might not have thought of are a paper map, paracord, small signal mirror, and headlamp. His list is more extensive than the office survival kit we've noted before. Check out Stewart's list to make sure you don't miss any items that could make all the difference when you need to get home safely.

What's in your Get Home Bag or office survival kit?

How to Build a Get Home Bag (+Book Giveaway) | The Art of Manliness