I came across a friend’s Facebook wall post and had one of the worst migraines  I ever had in my entire life.

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You know that feeling some people get when they’re out in the world with a Blackberry–that nasty “I’m so spiffy” feeling?  Well I seem to be inflicted with it too, and when I’m out there meeting clients without my mobile device, when it’s run low on battery or maybe fell down the toilet,  I feel naked.

Do you ever get that weird sense of being detached too?  Have you ever experienced losing touch of something that you’ve so gotten used to and felt really, really, absurdly helpless?  Well I have, and I’d like to share some tips on how to manage real-life tech sitches with low-tech fixes.

These tips came from the general idea of the Japanese’s “Urazawa”–a Japanese term for clever lifestyle tips and tricks where people look for ways to do with what they currently have, like picking up broken glass with a slice of bread, etc.

Cellphone Losing Charge
If your cellphone loses its battery charge too quickly while idle in your pocket, part of the problem may be that your pocket is too warm.
“Cellphone batteries do indeed last a bit longer if kept cool,” says Isidor Buchanan, editor of the Battery University Web site. The 98.6-degree body heat of a human, transmitted through a cloth pocket to a cellphone inside, is enough to speed up chemical processes inside the phone’s battery. That makes it run down faster. To keep the phone cooler, carry it in your purse or on your belt.

Should you find yourself stuck in a foreign place without a charger and would like to preserve the batteries until the next day (when you’re probably free to buy an extra charger), turn off the phone, wrap it with your silk scarf and store it in a drawer.  The natural supple coolness of the scarf will give it just the right cool temp it needs to prolong its battery life.

Remote Car Key
Suppose your remote car door opener does not have the range to reach your car across the parking lot. Hold the metal key part of your key fob against your chin, then push the unlock button. The trick turns your head into an antenna, says Tim Pozar, a Silicon Valley radio engineer.
Mr. Pozar explains, “You are capacitively coupling the fob to your head. With all the fluids in your head it ends up being a nice conductor. Not a great one, but it works.” Using your head can extend the key’s wireless range by a few car lengths.

Dry Ink Cartridge
If your printer’s ink cartridge runs dry near the end of an important print job, remove the cartridge and run a hair dryer on it for two to three minutes. Then place the cartridge back into the printer and try again while it is still warm.

“The heat from the hair dryer heats the thick ink, and helps it to flow through the tiny nozzles in the cartridge,” says Alex Cox, a software engineer in Seattle. “When the cartridge is almost dead, those nozzles are often nearly clogged with dried ink, so helping the ink to flow will let more ink out of the nozzles.” The hair dryer trick can squeeze a few more pages out of a cartridge after the printer declares it is empty.

Cellphone in the Toilet
It could happen to anyone: you dropped your cellphone in the toilet. Take the battery out immediately, to prevent electrical short circuits from frying your phone’s fragile internals. Then, wipe the phone gently with a towel, and shove it into a jar full of uncooked rice.

It works for the same reason you may keep few grains of rice in your salt shaker to keep the salt dry. Rice has a high chemical affinity for water — that means the molecules in the rice have a nearly magnetic attraction for water molecules, which will be soaked up into the rice rather than beading up inside the phone.

Longer Wi-Fi Reach
If your home Wi-Fi router doesn’t reach the other end of the house, don’t rush out to buy more wireless gear to stretch your network. Instead, build a six-inch-high passive radio wave reflector from kitchen items, like an aluminum cookie sheet.

Follow the instructions at http://freeantennas. com/projects/ template. Place the completed reflector — a small, curved piece of metal that reflects radio waves just like a satellite TV dish — behind your Wi-Fi router.  It focuses the router’s energy in one direction — toward the other end of the house — rather than letting it dissipate its strength in a full circle. No cables, no batteries, no technical knowledge required. Yet it can easily double the range of your network.

Dirty Discs
You need to clean a skipping DVD or CD, but as a bachelor you don’t have any sissy cleaning fluids? Soak a washcloth with vodka or mouthwash.

Alcohol is a powerful solvent, perfectly capable of dissolving fingerprints and grime on the surface of a disc. A $5 bottle of Listerine in your medicine cabinet may do the job as effectively as a $75 bottle of DVD cleaning fluid. Also, swabbing your copy of “Lost Weekend” with Stoli instead of fussing with a Discwasher kit is a lot more manly.

Too Much Flash
If your cellphone’s built-in camera flash is much too bright, washing out photos, tape a small piece of paper over the flash. Experiment with different colors and thicknesses of paper to tone down the flash from superbright white to a more pleasing glow for evening photos.

Crashed Hard Drive
If — no, make that when — your PC’s hard drive crashes and can’t be read, don’t be too quick to throw it out. Stick it in the freezer overnight.
“The trick is a real and proven, albeit last resort, recovery technique for some kinds of otherwise-fatal hard-drive problems,” writes Fred Langa on his Windows Secrets Web site. Many hard drive failures are caused by worn parts that no longer align properly, making it impossible to read data from the drive. Lowering the drive’s temperature causes its metal and plastic internals to contract ever so slightly. Taking the drive out of the freezer, and returning it to room temperature can cause those parts to expand again.

That may help free up binding parts, Mr. Langa explains, or at least let a failing electrical component remain within specs long enough for you to recover your essential data.

Well, there you go.  I cannot guarantee the effectivity of each tip for each person, but it helps having these ideas stored in the emergency vault of your brain.

As weird as it may sound, I am honestly the type of person who likes to reminisce on learning memories—those embarrassing, blush-inducing, sometimes painful moments that have very deep moral lessons. And last night, I was up to it again. I was brought back to my junior year in college, when being stressed was considered new and cool, and cutting class was the solution to problems. Back then, I had a very, very , very serious professor who never smiled in class. She was known to ask one question to all her classes every start of the school year. The question was, “What’s the difference between efficiency and effectiveness?”. Sadly, at least in my book, no one ever got to answer correctly. Apparently, my junior year was to be my lucky year—I was picked to answer the dreaded question.

Last night, as I forced myself to sleep, the same question kept running through my mind.
“What’s the difference between efficiency and effectiveness?”

So today, to further remind myself of that lesson, I made it a point to pay Google a visit, and I chanced upon the very answer that my professor told me when I failed to answer her:

Efficiency means doing things right; Effectiveness means doing the right things. Confusing?

No, it’s actually very simple. The defining factor is how the outputs are done. For example, in a call center environment, the output of being efficient is the number of customer service calls taken at day’s end. Meanwhile, the output of being effective is the number of customers who are satisfied with the service rendered at the end of the day.

In life and in work, there is a very thin line on being effective and being efficient. However, we can all be efficient and effective—it’s all in the matter of keeping your mind clear of cluttered thoughts that you achieve this. With that in mind, and proper time management, you can finish more tasks in a day and satisfy your clients as well as your boss.