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

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

There was a time not long ago when you could Google the name of any product plus the word “sucks” and get a search result yielding a fairly clear and passionate taste of what Internet users thought of the said product and how it stacked up against other products. Try that trick today, however, and you’re likely to find that according to the results returned by a Google search, pretty much everything sucks.

For example, take the two popular Blackberry Twitter apps, ÜberTwitter and Open Beak (formerly Twitterberry). Popular opinion is split: Internet users enjoy both, and likewise feel both suck. And that makes it a bit harder to decide which of the two a Blackberry user ought to download. So we asked withbeans.com’s technology correspondent to load both apps on his Blackberry and report back. Some observations:

– ÜberTwitter is pretty. Its balloons are easier on the eyes than Open Beak’s interface.

– ÜberTwitter has far more menu choices than Open Beak via the all-purpose Blackberry menu button.

– ÜberTwitter allows you to drill down more with your menu choices, but that can make it all too easy to back all the way out of the application when you’re hitting the return key to get back to a screen. Here Open Beak’s simplicity is a plus – you won’t find yourself inadvertently leaving the app as much.

– ÜberTwitter has “@[your Twitter name]” as one of its menu choices, not so with Open Beak. Also when our tech correspondent was cited in a Tweet, ÜberTwitter sent an alert; Open Beak did not.

– Both apps provide a glimpse of your Twitter timeline; Open Beak took a shorter amount of time to retrieve it.

So while neither app sucks, ÜberTwitter, by a comfortable margin, doesn’t suck more.

According to yet another Google search there is one thing Blackberry and Twitter fans do seem to agree on: Twitter is taking a bit too long certainly took long enough to come out with their official app for the Blackberry.

If you’re just starting up your blog or Web site and you’re not sure if you want to monetize it or if you don’t know if how well it’s trafficked even matters to you, you may not see the immediate need for installing and using Google Analytics. And that would be short-sighted.

Let’s start with the fact that Analytics is fiendishly easy to install – a withbeans.com correspondent added the tracking code to his Web site within a few minutes and was also pleased to discover that when he moved his site pages over to WordPress, Analytics continued analyzing without interruption (by the way, WordPress users running analytics would also do well to install this plugin that tracks lots of links from within posts).

But the main reason to install Analytics right away isn’t just because it’s there, or its ease of installation or use. The first day you install this program is akin to the first day you start shooting a time-lapse photograph of a flower growing – you’re not getting instant gratification from this puppy. You may have to wait a week or two or a month to see appreciable changes. And the moment you see visitation start to claw upwards on your site is akin to that joyful moment in the time-lapse photo when you see the flower petals starting to open. In short, even if you don’t think you need Analytics now, it needs a little time to cook.

Our aforementioned withbeans.com correspondent didn’t need Analytics at first, either, but once he incorporated more jump pages and posts into his site, he did have a desire to see which pages were underperforming. His favorite Analytics feature? The simple “day/week/month/year” toggle that gives him a glimpse of site visits and reassures him that he isn’t the only one visiting his site. Because let’s face it, admit it or not, how well your site’s trafficked always matters to you.

Image source: Google

Bluetooth speakerphones that do double duty as a hands-free car kit and conference speaker are not so common that they’ve become passé but enough have come to market that it’s already a struggle to figure out which of these gadgets is ahead of the pack. Well, if having your Bluetooth go green packs appeal, Scosche Industries unveiled a solar Bluetooth speakerphone at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show that also ended up in a CES travel gadget round-up by Travel & Leisure.

Like most Bluetooth speakers designed with motorists in mind, the solChat, as it’s called, will take a charge from an old-school USB hookup or car adapter, but thereafter can be clipped to the windshield visor or can be suctioned directly to the windshield to soak up the sun’s rays; according to the manufacturer the “integrated solar panel continuously re-charges the lithium ion battery.”

In all other respects the unit functions like most other similar Bluetooth speakers do, so the embedded how-to video, while not absolutely necessary, gives you a good idea of how delightfully small the folks at Scosche managed to make this product.

Image source:  Scosche Industries

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) still generates enough buzz that CNET’s into its fifth year of nominating products for its Best of CES Awards, and among the gadgets that made the cut for its Best of CES 2010 round-up is the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid.

Hearing the word “hybrid” associated with a car may not immediately generate skepticism about whether and how well it works, but when it comes to smaller gadgets it’s a natural reaction, and CNET raises good questions about this notebook whose screen undocks from the keyboard “to become its own handheld Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered tablet.” CNET makes the point that a Lenovo rep demonstrated the undocking at the show, which makes the reviewers “curious as to how delicate the procedure is and whether the laptop might accidentally disconnect under casual use” and also wonder “will both devices sync well with each other? Will the battery life be suitable? None of these could be determined in the space of a few minutes.”

Those concerns aside, it’s hard to deny not only how cool this thing looks but how cool it would be to utilize it in a presentation if it actually works the way it should. CNET noted that the tablet’s touchscreen performance and video playback was a mixed bag, but the one feature to get excited about is that “the base, when detached, can continue to function as its own Core 2 computer independent of the tablet–a monitor would need to be attached, but it opens up possibilities for the U1 to truly act as two devices in one. Separate batteries and Wi-Fi antennas are contained in both the base and the tablet screen, while the tablet has the 3G and Bluetooth antennas, as well as speakers and a webcam.”

This kind of redundancy, we’ll say again, is exciting, especially when you consider how versatile the hybrid would be if, say, at a trade show you could easily attach another monitor to the U1’s keyboard to let your colleague continue demonstrating an app at your company’s booth while you ran off with the tablet to demo something else. Practically, it would probably be easier to have two separate devices, but that’s where the cleverness of the end-user comes in – how could having this undockable tablet really save me time and energy on a day-to-day basis? What do you think?

Image source: Lenovo