Gadget Guru
Presuming we’re leaving out ear buds and on-ear headphones here, both for reasons of space and because each category is a subjective minefield, GaGu will limit this selection to only over-ear kit. There are a couple of key kinds of cans, both of which tend to have a very different feel: closed-backed and open-backed.
The former is a completely sealed enclosure. Sound goes one way, towards your ears. This means the majority of outside noise can’t make it in to ruin your tunes, and is the logical reason that you’ll only find noise cancelling cleverness in closed-back cans. They’re close, warm, and keep the real world away – they’re core to the patented Guru familyavoidance technique. GaGu’s top pick doesn’t stray far from the meta, as he’ll suggest the Sony WH-1000XM4 all day long – but those Apple AirPods Max do sound mighty amazing.
Open-back headphones allow air through to your ears, preventing pressure from building up; they therefore sound much more natural, and have a far, far wider soundstage. Hooray, except: they let every
There are a couple of key kinds of cans, both of which tend to have a very different feel: closed-backed and open-backed.
other sound in, and bleed their own sound out. If you can find a quiet spot to sit back and relax you’re in for something wonderful, but if you can’t you’ll be able to hear your children screeching and they’ll be able to hear that you’re listening to the Bee Gees on a loop. The Beyerdynamic DT 990 Pro is a heavily favoured set on the low end; head to the high end, and you find utterly incredible kit like Focal’s Utopia – but they do cost $5,499.
Treadmill, static bike, or something else?
GEMMA WILKINSON
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 kilos, 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 covers you for all kinds of resistance and joist-loosening leaping actions, while the FITT Gym 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.
Gadget Guru’s magic box
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, 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 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 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. 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.
Can I make my own cheese?
HAYLEY
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. 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 Scanpan Impact Stock Pot, which is around $70 and offers a good consistent bottom temperature. Much like GaGu himself.