I should not have been surprised that more than one mount exists to attach a Garmin nüvi to a bicycle’s handlebars. There’s an adapter for everything.

It definitely applies in amateur astronomy, where I’ve been wondering about this sort of thing lately. I asked about attaching a camera to an equatorial mount and was told to drill a hole in a standard dovetail saddle for the ¼"-20 screw. Nope: Orion sells a dovetail with a screw already installed; it costs seventeen bucks. I was told I could make a side-by-side telescope mount with a little work. Nope: Losmandy sells one — granted, it’s a Losmandy dovetail, whereas a Sky-Watcher mount uses the narrower Vixen-compatible system, but yes, there’s an adapter for that too. Sky and Telescope’s February 2009 review of the previous version of Orion’s six-megapixel StarShoot Pro camera bemoaned the lack of an adapter to connect SLR lenses to it. Guess what? Adapters are now available.

I’m not physically handy; I’m unlikely to ever have a workshop in my garage, and I’m not about to start machining things. It will always be easier for me to buy something with the money I’ve made doing something I’m actually good at. So it’s heartening to discover that for most things I can see a need for, I’m not alone, and someone who actually is handy is filling that need.