A
GaGu would, were it not for
the restraining order, come
round and cauterize your
tear ducts for you. Presuming that’s
not something you want (it rarely
is) you may wish to instead don a
pair of special onion-proof goggles:
half gag gift, half useful way to make
yourself into the dorkiest chef in the
room. Really, you may as well grab
KitchenCraft’s £12 Dame Edna-style
goggles to get the full effect.
Rather than isolating your
eyeballs, why not isolate the onion?
Peel it, half it (with your eyes
closed) then wallop it into
Kenwood’s CH180A Mini Chopper
(£15) to keep all those fumes safely
contained. And let’s be realistic:
that’s only a tenner away from the
Kenwood Compact FP120 Food
Processor (£25), which is going to
be a lot more useful in the long run.
Alternatively, do as Guru does and
buy bags of pre-chopped onions
for the freezer, a slightly more
expensive and wasteful exercise
which eliminates all of this
nonsense entirely.GADGET GURU’S MAGIC BOX
A
Let it be clear, Guru is no
photography expert. A man
from Boots keeps trying to
put one of those passive-aggressive
oval ‘it wasn’t our fault’ stickers on
your author’s phone screen just to
cut out the middle man. Guru is,
though, a master of mashing things
onto other things, so he can offer a
few general clues here.
It may be tempting to suspect
that manufacturer-specific lens
types are just a way to tie you into
an ecosystem and, over time, a
way to ensure that the money firing
out of your wallet towards your
expensive DSLR habit lands
directly in that manufacturer’s
pocket. Not (entirely) so: a camera
system is a delicate balance of
sensor, connector, electronics and
optics. For the body of your
camera to work perfectly with its
lens, the latter needs to be sitting
at just the right flange focal
length from the sensor in order
to focus properly.
Converting the threading and
focal length of a foreign or vintage
lens isn’t actually that tricky- there’s a vast variety of converters
out there that can help you attach
one thing to another. They’re not
cheap, however, because they
generally need to use complicated
bridging lenses to tweak the focal
distance; turning those sparkling
junk shop optics into something
you can use could end up costing
a pretty penny.
If you can’t convert the
electronic side of things, you may
lose automatic control of a number
of lens features – and if the lens
you’re trying to use doesn’t have
a manual aperture ring you’ll be
stuck at maximum aperture, which
isn’t ideal. Thankfully some
converters use what are called
dandelion chips to convert the
communication protocols between
lens and camera. These, again, add
another layer of cost, because of
course they do.
Why can’t I just use any lens
on any camera?
L OWENS, BLACKPOOL
How do I chop
onions without
crying?
OLIVIA WEST,
DUMFRIESPerhaps technology cannot solve every
problem, perhaps it can. GaGu is in a rare
state, one in which he is completely out
of his depth and positively afraid: the
household has gone positively renovation
crazy, with the kitchen and bathroom now
on the (pricey) rejuvenation docket. This
means Pinterest mood boards, reams of
upsetting cost-tracking spreadsheets,
project management by the inimitable Mrs
Guru and her specialist software tools. The
thing that worries Guru most is that he can’t
just whip out a gadget or an app to make
this all run smoothly. He’s supposed to think
for himself, make decisions, and control the
thick local accent which only spills out of his
mouth when workmen are
allowed through the gates of
Guru Towers. Absolutely awful.
If any reader knows of a
technological solution for
this one, drop GaGu a line
- consider it payment for the
years of stupid questions Guru
has been forced to answer.
Google’s
Nest Wifi mesh
system (£199
for a two-unit
setup) crossed
Guru’s desk this
month, and it’s
very good. In
some ways GaGu reckons it’s a downgrade
from the original Google Wifi, particularly
because its Point satellites don’t include any
Ethernet, but they make up for it with
Google Assistant support. It’s child-simple
to set up, too, though GaGu can’t see it
beating out his trusty home-blanketing
Netgear Orbi setup. So what might replace
it? Not the redesigned Orbi
Dual-Band Mesh system, which
also drops Ethernet, that’s for
sure. But there’s a significant
amount of drool pooling on
GaGu’s t-shirt over the Orbi Wifi
6, which includes 802.11ax
networking and is likely to be
astonishing when it launches.MARCH 2020 T3 27Gadget guru
ABOVE
Don’t worry, it’s
just a defence
mechanism
against being put
in a nice stew