MARCH 2022 T3 25Gadget guru
A
Wrong person to ask,
reader – Guru’s prize kicks
are being investigated as
a priority by the EPA. But Guru
knows this: if you’re a true
sneakerhead and you’ve stocked up
on lurid Nikes to show off (rather
than those destined to generate
mysterious spores) they deserve
better protection than they’ll get on
a shelf. ShoeStack’s display boxes
cost £30 for a two-pack, and give
you the option of a completely clear
box, or a black one with a dropped
front or side. Chuck in some silica
packets, which you should have
plenty of if you haven’t eaten them
all already, and you’re golden.
For already over-pungent shoes,
you might try a forlorn search for
the Panasonic MS-DS100 – Japan-
only, as far as Guru can ascertain,
and almost certainly ineffective –
which uses wacky ionisation tech.
Sit it on top of your trainers and it’ll
blast them with negatively charged
hydroxyl radicals, apparently
neutralising the nastiness in about
five hours. Apparently.GADGET GURU’S MAGIC BOX
A
White coat chemist Guru,
fresh from his subterranean
lab that definitely does not
contain unholy half-human
half-machine hybrids, has a little
science lesson for you. Limescale is
calcium carbonate, left behind in
deposits when hard water
evaporates, and it’s heavily
alkaline, meaning (as your mum
has probably told you ad nauseum)
you can dissolve it with mildly
acidic substances like vinegar or
lemon juice. For surfaces it won’t
run off, spray some on, wait a bit,
then scrub the residue away. For
things like showerheads and taps,
try rubber-banding a bag full of
dilute acid mix and leaving it on
the affected fitting for a while. Just
be careful around brass hardware.
That’s practical, but impractical
too. Fixing a problem that’s already
happened is one thing, but cutting
it off at the source means you’ll
have less ongoing maintenance to
deal with. Depending on your
fluency with a blowtorch and a
greasy rag, the following is
probably an ask-your-plumber task,
but GaGu would recommend
looking into whole-home water
softeners, which use resin beads
to suck out the calcium and
magnesium ions in your water,
switching them for sodium. The
beads do need occasional periods
of regeneration, and special salt
(much like your dishwasher
demands) to do it, but if you opt for
a larger and pricier twin-tank
solution there’ll be no break in your
soft water.
If you’re really only bothered
about your shower, you could buy
an incredibly ugly water softener
showerhead, which is likely far
worse than the one you have, or
an in-line softener, which may or
may not do a half-decent job.
AquaHomeGroup’s 15-stage filter
should be around £29, comes in a
bunch of fixin’-matching finishes,
and you can install it yourself.How do I stop my shower
scaling up?
HANNAH GAPPER, LEWISHAMHow can I keep
my trainers
fresh?
HARRY, VIA EMAILA few issues ago Guru
was grilled by a reader
on Bluetooth latency.
One benevolent (or
perhaps furious) audio
brand took your favourite
uncle’s ramblings as an
opportunity to thrust a
suitable product into his
hands: the Tronsmart Onyx Prime True
Wireless Earbuds (£55) are compatible with
the aptX Adaptive codec, meaning they can
go hi-res, low-latency, or everything in
between. Surprisingly good? Absolutely, for
the price, you get a richer sound than you
might expect, with dual hybrid drivers
essentially calling your ear drums out for a
fight. ‘Made for audiophiles’ though,
Tronsmart? Wind it in: while the Onyx
Primes are indeed adept at wrangling
low-latency audio, audio experts are going
to sniff at the custard-thick bass layer. Guru
quite enjoyed its bombast, but you may not.
To encourage his brainy-but-wayward
kids to code, Guru recently picked up thePlayShifu Tacto coding kit (£45). You get
little robot figurines with conductive bumps
on their feet laid out in different patterns
which get read by the multi-touch function
of a tablet screen to identify which is which.
Guru really enjoyed solving the puzzles in
the accompanying app. The kids, though,
were less than impressed that the toys
could not control MrBeast or DanTDM and
thus have barely touched them. C’est la vie.
As part of his less-interesting pays-the-
bills work, Guru was asked to write a
positive article on NFTs, which hurt a lot. If
you have a wallet full of crypto-apes, he
invites you to write to him to convince him
why a bundle of digital receipts that
confer no copyright or
ownership has any true
value, because the
only effusive
sources he can
find are baddies
trying to scam
him out of
cryptobucks.ABOVE
You don’t want
Chris Whitty’s
next press
conference to be
on your footwear