"Please help me find a replacement for a lost 'best friend'," a person who goes by piper2010cameron wrote in an online post. "I have searched everywhere." The description of the missing companion: A tiny stuffed tiger with orange and black stripes, a small triangular nose, and a fuzzy white belly. And then there came this heartbreaking line: "My poor kiddo has been asking why 'Itsy Bitsy' hasn't come home and it kills me."
Losing your keys is the worst -- so it makes sense to do whatever you can to ensure your keys get back to you safely, should they be misplaced. For some that may mean attaching a Bluetooth-enabled location tracker, but I'd rather not have yet another bulky plastic doohickey on my keychain next to my flash drive. Luckily, the web has come up with a pretty low-tech method of ensuring your keys are returned safely. But first, you'll need to visit a pet store.
Losing your favourite piece of jewellery sucks. Losing your wedding ring: That's a nightmare. You could always rent a metal detector and sweep the area yourself, but The Ring Finders, a group of jewellery-finding enthusiasts, are better equipped to help you find your lost jewellery.
It can happen to anybody: you stick your card into an ATM machine to make a withdrawal, only to be greeted by a strange whirring sound or error message. Congratulations: your card has just been eaten. This is annoying at the best of times, but it can swiftly turn into a disaster if you're overseas or about to enter a long weekend. Here's a quick tip to ensure you'll never be short of cash.
Nobody plans to lose their gadgets, but anybody can make a few moves ahead of time to up their chances of getting their stuff back, whether with the help of good-natured finders or subtle tracking tools. Here are our favourite post-theft tools.
It's a great big world out there for a tiny thing like a lost iPod or mobile phone. SendMeHome is a free web based application that generates unique ID tags for your items, so that should a good Samaritan find your lost item, a short trip to SendMeHome.com is all it takes to send you a message indicating that your item has been found and how you can get it back. The site has packets of labels you can purchase or print, or you can write the SendMeHome ID number on the object with a permanent marker. If you have a different method of tagging your items to help them return home, share it below in the comments.
US-centric: Misplaced your cell phone around the house and don't have another phone on hand to call it up to locate it? Give your number to web site PhoneMyPhone and they'll instantly ring you up. Aside from instant calling to locate your phone, PhoneMyPhone will also schedule phone calls at specific times, similar to previously mentioned Popularity Dialer, to get you out of that boring meeting or awful date if you need it. As for sounding off the ring when you misplace your phone—it may not get a pizza to your door like Google Maps used to, but the easy-to-remember PhoneMyPhone should ensure a quick recovery from the recesses of your couch cushions. Thanks David! PhoneMyPhone
We've previously featured "Professor" Solomon's free pages featuring his 12 Principles for finding what you've lost, but now the good man is offering up his entire 67-page book, "How to Find Lost Objects," as a free PDF download. If you not only want to find a particular lost object—like, say, the iPod Touch I managed to misplace for two months—but want to learn the habits and thinking that help you find things on a regular basis, hit the link for your guide to "The Eureka Zone," "Domestic Drift," "Pocket Gobble," and more. How to Find Lost Objects
