A
Grandma Guru would have
(and, indeed, did) put GaGu
in The Cage if she caught
him peeping. Thankfully times have
changed (and Guru’s lock-picking
skills have improved) so we can
think of more sensible solutions. In
this case, it’s a privacy filter, which
vastly cuts down the viewable
angle of your screen and basically
completely undoes many years of
hard engineering work done to
improve flat panel displays.
3M is your best choice. Their
filters (from £45-£100 depending
on the size of your screen) use
microlouvers, basically little pointy
filters that direct the light forward
to your eyes and stop it going
side-to-side, reducing the viewable
angle to around 60 degrees. You
can go cheaper, but GaGu can’t
vouch for the effectiveness of
lower-tier filters, which means your
little one might get their eyes on
whatever horrific imagery you’re
trying to hide from them.GADGET GURU’S MAGIC BOX
A
Let’s be realistic. GaGu
doesn’t think you’ll be able
to create your own iPhone.
If the adventures of YouTube
channel Strange Parts are anything
to go by, even access to Shenzen’s
vast multi-floor emporiums of grey
market second-hand parts and a
desk full of microscopes and reflow
solderers doesn’t make this even
close to an easy task. But creating
your own controllers? Fiddling
with electronics to make A Thing?
That is something you can
absolutely do. It’s something even
Guru can do, and his expertise in
these matters extends mostly to
breaking and ruining.
Guru recently picked up an
Arduino kit from Amazon, which is
just about flooded with the things.
It wasn’t an official Arduino, rather
one of the Chinese clones which
come in far cheaper – expect to
pay around £40 for a big ol’ box
with the compatible board itself
and a whole host of tinkering
components, compared to around
£70 for the official equivalent.
Following a guide or two reveals
that this is basically Lego with 5-volt
rails; you plug your components
together with teensy little wires
poking into a breadboard. Then you
just assemble your code by copying
and tweaking likely looking chunks
or using pre-prepared libraries, and
you’re done.
Guru does have some
programming experience – the kind
which sent his university tutors into
early retirement – but he reckons it
would be easy enough for even you
to understand. Half the time you
don’t actually need to understand
it. GaGu used a bunch of arcade
buttons to build a MIDI controller à
la the Midi Fighter 3D (£170) using
the alarmingly simple Control
Surface library (github.com/tttapa)
and about eight lines of code. Just
get out there and have a go – as of
the end of last year, you can even
make Alexa-enabled gadgets.Do you recommend that I
make my own gadgets?
GARY TIVERTON, WELSHPOOL
How do I stop
my kids peering
at my laptop
screen?
KAY WEST, GLASGOW
Here’s a thing: have you noticed that the
US-only Wyze Cam ($20, pictured) and
UK-centric Neos Smartcam (£25) look
identical? They aren’t. Yes, they use the
same core hardware, but there are big
differences in their firmware and big
differences in their apps; it turns out both
are simply rebadged and reprogrammed
versions of the Xiaomi Xiaofang 1S
(around £18). What is worse, you can’t
flash, say, Wyze firmware onto a Neos
cam, because it’s tied to the MAC address
of the hardware.
That’s not to say that you can’t monkey
with the firmware at all.
There’s a custom
firmware available
(search Dafang Hacks)
that can add features to
(and get rid of a few
annoyances of) both
the original and the
rebadged cameras
- even adding some
rudimentary
HomeKit support – but
it’s very much an at your
own risk situation. Given
the pocket money price
of these cams, though, it
might be worth an
experiment or two.
While GaGu will
maintain that Android
tablets are one of the
biggest disappointments of the tech market
until he is blue in the face, the junior
members of the Guru household are doing
their best to change his mind. Both invested
their Christmas and birthday money in the
2019 version of the surprisingly cheap
Amazon Fire HD 10 (£109-£149 depending
on spec and included ads). Guru is alarmed
at how capable it is both at running apps
and at shutting the pair of them up and,
while it’s not what you’d call a proper
Android tablet out of the box, installing
Google’s core apps is a five minute exercise.
A massive bargain – miles from an iPad,
certainly, but a fraction of the price.APRIL 2020 T3 27Gadget guru
ABOVE
An Arduino kit:
arguably less of a
puzzle than your
router settings