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