If you’ve ever wanted to know how to properly dodge a bullet or wrestle free from an alligator then you could do a lot worse than pick up an instant classic, The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. Through a mix of diagrams and real tips sourced by Navy SEALS, stuntmen, and other authorities, the book manages to be straightforward while talking you though some unlikely and absurd situations, and that’s what makes it funny.

Decidedly unfunny, however, is that moment when you realize that you just sent an angry email in haste or have sent a message to the wrong person.  If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, you know that nothing quite matches the chill and the horror that comes over you, making you wish you could instead wrestle an alligator or dodge that bullet.

Speaking of dodging a bullet, the Worst-Case book has spawned sequels as well as a highly entertaining Worst-Case Scenarios Web site where you can glean a bunch of tips for free, including advice on how to take back a nasty email. Using your email system’s recall function doesn’t always work, as you may have found when someone has tried to recall a message they’ve sent to you, at which point you have, of course, been all the more curious and eager to read it before it can be recalled.

There are also free software programs that might allow you to retract the message, or, the Worst-Case site suggests, you could try delete the message from the recipient’s computer:

“As soon as you realize your mistake, call the recipient and send him on a fool’s errand, or have the recipient paged to another area. Go to his desk. Kneel so you are not easily visible. Open his e-mail program and delete the message. Check the “trash” mailbox to make sure it was fully deleted and not just moved. Delete it permanently.”

With Beans does not condone this particular approach, but we are comfortable with the Worst-Case site’s more preventative suggestion that “it is best to queue outgoing e-mail in your outbox rather than send it immediately. This gives you the opportunity to pause and reflect on your wording, and then change or delete the message before it is sent.” In other words, let yourself cool off, or just delete that fantastic but doomed-to-be-misrouted off-color comment before it leaves your outbox. If it’s that funny, take it outside the office.

Image source: Petr Kratochvil

Let’s face it, when a hard drive fails, our first instinct after shrieking “NO, NO! REALLY? NOW? Come ON!” is not to blame the drive, but to blame ourselves for not being better about routinely backing up all our data, which is what we said we’d start doing after the last hard drive failure.

After a hard disk crash there are two typical responses: Phone a repair place, or take an “it is what it is” attitude and not bother trying to resuscitate the dead drive. Well, there’s evidently a third thing you can try: freeze it.

Why? Well, even the non-particle physicists among us get the idea that heat makes molecules expand and cold makes them contract, and in a post about the topic, lifehacker’s Adam Pash quotes a sound explanation from “bobeltomate,” one of his readers:

“When you chill the drive, it shrinks and tightens up the mechanical parts that may have loosened, improves electrical issues (think cracked solder joints), as well as the old adage that electronics generally run better when cold. It eventually fails again because the heat buildup, of course.”

Since you may only have a small window once your drive heats up again, one tip offered in a Server Zone post cited by Pash is to retrieve the most important data first. Server Zone also suggests double-bagging the drive (to keep out moisture, bobeltomate suggests) and freezing it for about 12 hours before taking a stab at reinstalling it and recovering data.

If the drive indeed fails again once it heats up, Server Zone suggests you can try refreezing it again. But at that point you’ll probably ask yourself, is this data worth the fuss? Up to you. But if you try it and it works, you’ve got a good story to tell.

Image source: Server Zone

You could argue that there are worse problems than receiving unwanted romantic advances, but at the end of the day if the advances really are unwanted, it’s still a problem.

Women in particular don’t have to be told that at the very least, unwanted attention from a man can be a nuisance, and sometimes when that attention comes from a neighbor or “harmless” guy in the neighborhood, the solution is sometimes to grin and bear it. But what if Mr. Harmless is also a little touchy feely?

If you’re a woman or care about one, pass on this story of “Anonymous from New Mexico,” who in her letter to New York Times Social Q’s columnist Philip Galanes, complained about a touchy-feely grocer who had “always been friendly. But lately he’s started patting me on the arm and kissing my fingers as I reach past him.” She goes on to say that she wants to shut the guy down without being rude about it.

Galanes advises that the next time it happens she ought to “step away more decisively when he begins to pet, or yank back your hand as he puckers up. He may pick up on larger cues. And they can still be given with a smile on your face.”

If that proved ineffective, Galanes suggests ratcheting up her objection to a polite verbal response, but our instinct on this one is that if Mr. Harmless is from the touchy-feely old school, he’ll actually respond to the physical cues put forth by Anonymous.  If he gets the message, his feelings might be hurt, but at that point, perhaps, both he and Anonymous can move forward and not have to avoid each other.

Now if Mr. Harmless and Anonymous were coworkers, that would probably be a different, more dramatic dynamic. But, there is something to be said for trying this discreet, more decisive response. At least the first time it happens. After that, Mr. Harmless, as withbeans.com’s parenting correspondent might say, you better hope that’s not my daughter you’re annoying.

Image source: Edward Betts via Wikipedia Commons

Reader’s Digest has been reporting on life management trends since before most of us were born, so it’s all the more satisfying that the “next big things” roundup in their May issue is not only relevant, but also includes gadgets that we haven’t seen discussed in too many other places. Among them is Intel’s Home Dashboard, a device that communicates with your home appliances and also permits you to control said appliances while away from home via your smart phone or laptop.

It’s worth taking a moment to scan some of the dashboard’s nifty features but there are some particularly cool things worth noting here. For starters, the dash does more than “talk” to your appliances – it manages them. A smart thermostat can adjust the overall heating and cooling in your house (whether you’re there or not) and, according to Intel, adapt “its settings based on the weather conditions, the current energy price and your evolving usage patterns, helping you avoid spikes in cost.” If it actually manages to do that, the other management functions —  including the dash’s ability to anticipate appliance performance problems – are gravy.

The “fun” functions include the aforementioned remote management of the dash, enabling you to toggle on your home security system from the office, say, or toggle off your coffee pot from Aruba. The possible ways to creatively control appliances while away from home are endless.

Reader’s Digest says the dash resembles an oversized iPhone, though a more accurate description might be stately iPad. Interestingly, Intel powers the dash with an Atom processor-based platform, cousin to the better-performing processors found in some netbooks.

A prototype for the dashboard premiered in January 2010, Reader’s Digest notes, and Intel will conduct some pilot programs in selected homes this year.

Image source: Intel

Imagine if instead of endlessly circling the block looking for a parking spot, you could somehow search for a space online, find one, and pay five bucks to secure it. That’s the idea behind StreetParkNYC, a Web app that entrepreneur Rufus Davis launched a few weeks ago.

It works like this: A parking spot seeker enters an address for the neighborhood in which he’s seeking a space as well as the time he’d like to find one; the program then returns search results showing fellow motorists who have let Streetparknyc.com know of their intent to vacate their parking spots around the time you hope to get one.  If your search comes back with no hits, the app will ask you if you want to be more flexible about where and when you hope to park.

If the spot seeker does find a match, he agrees to pay $5 for the coordinates of the space; the person who has volunteered to give the space up in turn gets credits posted to his StreetParkNYC account.

In his article about the app, New York Times city critic Ariel Kaminer wonders whether a program like StreetParkNYC could reduce traffic congestion, since it would get circling space seekers off the roads faster. Kaminer asks, “could it make driving more pleasant? Would that, in turn, lead more people into cars? Could reducing congestion then have the effect of . . . increasing congestion? The mind reels.”

As the name of the app implies, it only covers the five boroughs of New York City – Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island – but the business model could no doubt be tested in cities with similar parking issues. And as founder Davis joked to Kaminer, the possibilities might involve” merging StreetParkNYC with a dating service: post your photo along with your parking spot and see what develops.”

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Remember those annoying and environmentally incorrect Styrofoam peanuts that would messily tumble out of gadget-packed boxes? It was only a matter of time before packing material got less annoying as well as more sustainable. And while you won’t find packaging made from actual peanuts, what would you say to mushroom roots? That’s one of the key ingredients behind EcoCradle.

Well, mushroom root is the layperson’s term – it’s fungal mycelium, actually, that’s allowed to grow for about 5-10 days among agricultural waste products like rice hulls and cotton gin trash. The end result, according to Ecocradle inventors Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre is “all-natural, rigid material…with similar material properties and cost as synthetic foams like expanded polystyrene,” better known as our old friend Styrofoam.

Like many inventions, EcoCradle came about somewhat serendipitously. Bayer and McIntyre were “fascinated by mushrooms growing on wood chips, and observing how the fungal mycelium strongly bonded the wood chips together” and figured if the fungus could be that durable, it could be put to other uses. EcoCradle is not only durable, but it’s pliable and totally biodegradable. It’s also completely safe and even edible, say the makers, though they note that ”it’s non-nutritious and doesn’t taste good.”

Check out the embedded video to hear more about this noble idea.

Image source: Ecovative Design LLC

If you’ve ever been in line behind someone who has asked a hotel clerk for an upgrade, you may have noticed a couple things:

1) The person didn’t ask in an effective way

2) The person didn’t get the upgrade

It’s not enough to just flat out ask for an upgrade or even to ask for it nicely – you have to give the desk clerk a good reason to say yes. One of the most overused tricks hotel guests use when booking a room is saying they’d appreciate an upgrade because it’s their honeymoon or anniversary. Unless you show the front desk clerk the “Just Married” cans that were attached to your car or present your marriage certificate, he likely won’t believe you.

A better approach is to scale it back a notch. Walk up to the front desk clerk and say something like, “This is a special trip for us, and we’re not sure when we might be able to take such a trip again, so would you consider upgrading us to a better room if it’s available?”

You’ve done two things here. You’ve given the clerk a reason to say yes to a reason that’s totally plausible (and probably true in almost every case). And you’ve used the words “if it’s available,” which brings us to the second tip. It pays to ask while booking your room if you can be placed on a list for a free space-available upgrade. If you have no luck, ask again when you check in; sometimes, if the hotel is on the cusp of overbooking its cheaper rooms or alternately if business is slow, the front desk may upgrade you on the spot for free. Like most things, it’s all in the approach.

Image source: Mattes via Wikimedia Commons

Maybe you didn’t take our advice about not buying an iPad, and you’re running one of its gaming apps right now. Or perhaps you’re nursing a bitter cup of coffee-house coffee as you watch “Fringe” on your laptop. Or maybe you’re just trying to find a song you can still stand on your MP3. No matter what you happen to be doing, we’re almost certain of one thing: at some point today, you probably spent some time trying to untangle your earbuds in an attempt to plug them into the device of your choice.

The solution: Retractable ear buds.

If you’ve ever used a bad tape measure whose tape refuses to retract into its casing gracefully, then you have reason to be skeptical of any retractable gadget. So here’s a strategy: try the Retrak Stereo Earbuds, as sturdy as models that sell for twice that — even models sold by Retrak — and at $9.99, won’t break the bank.

You’ll have about a yard of cord to play with on this thing, as well as clip if you ever use one. And if you manage to  lose these buds, sit on them, or break them, your outlay’s still less than the bitter coffee and sandwich you probably just bought at the coffee shop.

On the bright side: While these things are working, the next time you’re walking down the street, riding the bus, or about to brave the treadmill, think about all the hours of your life you’re getting back by not having to untangle before plugging in.

Image source: ReTrak