MARCH 2021 T3 27Gadget guru
A
Sure, though Guru will not
give you all the steps, nor
explore in any detail what
rennet actually is because it’s
thoroughly gross. You will need
some things that Guru can help
with, though: a good waterproof
digital thermometer, and a quality
stock pot in which to perform your
milky alchemy.
On the first count, while many of
GaGu’s rural cheese enthusiast
friends swear by good ’ol mercury
in a tube, he would direct you to a
more 21st century device like the
ChefAlarm from ETI. At £40 it’s
a disarmingly cheap digital
thermometer with a whole host of
functions, the most important of
which for your cheddar is its
dangly probe that comes with
a versatile pot clip.
The pot you employ will need to
be non-reactive metal like stainless
steel, glass, or pristine enamel. Guru
recommends the induction-friendly
James Martin 7-litre Deep Stockpot
from Stellar, which is around £50
and offers a good consistent
bottom temperature. Much like
GaGu himself.GADGET GURU’S MAGIC BOX
A
Before GaGu gives you a
proper answer, let him
be uncharacteristically
motivational (or justifiably
demotivational). If you’re buying an
exercise doodad because you’ve
piled on the ol’ Covid-19 lbs, don’t.
Just don’t. There’s plenty of time to
work on diet and exercise once the
world has stopped being a hideous
daily nightmare, and you are
entirely forgiven if hooking
takeaway curry sauce up to your
veins is the thing that gets you
through. Particularly if you’re the
type to gaze upon a dusty bit of
home gym kit and wonder quite
why you decided to spend a
month’s wages in order to lose a
third of your room’s footprint.
It would be great if Guru could
just get on and answer your
question, right? Yeah, it would, but
you’ve asked a question which
completely eliminates the factor
that inspired that first paragraph
rant: you. GaGu doesn’t know if you
like to hike, bike, run or whatever.
He doesn’t know your levels of
motivation, and he doesn’t know
what space you have. You could go
for, say, a Peloton, with its pricey
instructor-led subscription acting as
a fairly decent driver, but if cycling
isn’t for you, or you don’t have the
floor space for the (admittedly
compact) bike, that’d be no good.
So let’s take a more 2am
infomercial tack, and fulfil GaGu’s
legal obligation to give at least a
partly satisfactory answer by
suggesting some kind of weird
looking multi-exerciser. New
Image’s FITT range covers a load of
different HIIT workouts and it’s a
BIIT good; the FITT Cube (£100)
covers you for all kinds of
resistance and joist-loosening
leaping actions, while the FITT Gym
(£200) gives you a bunch of incline
and flat sliding actions with which
to torture your abs. Neither is super
expensive, both are small enough
that you won’t curse them.Treadmill, static bike,
or something else?
GEMMA WILKINSON, PETERBOROUGH
Can I make my
own cheese?
HAYLEY, VIA EMAIL
Guru’s trials and
tribulations in the home
renovation game are well
known by now, but
following the departure of
his previous builder from the
project (apparently he’d made
a mint on Bitcoin, so could no
longer be bothered) GaGu saw
the setback as an opportunity
to make things much smarter
and much more complex.
This means a new bathroom complete
with the Mira Mode smart shower
(somewhere around £500), which lets you
set the temperature in-app so you don’t
scald the kids. The kitchen gains an
induction hob and extractor fan both
equipped with AEG’s Hob2Hood function: a
Bluetooth connection that apparently links
the two so when things get hot, the hood
turns on. That’s pretty neat. Guru has also
spent an absolute fortune on Hue GU10
White Ambiance bulbs (shop around – £25
each seems a bit much) to get the
atmosphere just so. Stay tuned to find out if
these things actually work or not.
A vast amount of credit is due to the
ReMarkable 2 (£399) for its invaluable help
in getting all of this sorted out. Mrs Guru is
absolutely in love with the draw-on-it
e-paper tablet, so much so that she’s
already mashed through one of its pen nibs
with her notes. The fact that they’re all in
one place, easily PDFed up to send to an
increasingly confused builder, is just the
icing on the cake.
It’s mostly work and little play around
these parts, but Guru would also like to give
a special mention to Mario Kart Live: Home
Circuit (£100 for Luigi, if you’re not up for
being gouged about £300 for the
apparently rarer Mario
version). Guru Jr was lucky
enough to get it for his
birthday, and FPV
racing around
the living room
is just such a
lot of fun.ABOVE
And man saw
everything he
had curdled, and
behold, it was
very good