Hello friends! Welcome to Installer No. 43, your guide to the best and Edge-st things in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so excited you found us, and you can also read all the back issues on the Installer Homepage.)
I read about it this week memexes And telepathy And John Lennon’s wristwatchwatching Presumably innocent And Run Faire, to test Genvonk for AI search stuff, redo my home screen with Make stupid, and experimenting with overnight oats in an effort to make mornings less chaotic. (It turns out that peanut butter makes almost everything 20 percent better.)
I also have for you a new tech podcast, some nifty new gadgets, a new calendar app, the game that will take over your weekend, and much more. Let’s get into it.
(As always, the best part of Installer are your ideas and tips. What are you into now? What great apps/books/podcasts/shows/games/recipes/what else have you discovered and love? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might like this too Installertell them to subscribe here.)
The drop
- The Asus VivoBook S15. Copilot Plus PCs are coming. It’s been a strange rollout, with all the Recall complications, but we’re starting to get a sense of what this new era of Qualcomm-powered Windows devices can do. So far I’m pretty optimistic, but I’m still waiting to see how the new Surfaces turn out.
- Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree. The overall vibe of this massive new DLC is basically “it’s Elden Ring, but somehow even more so.” Considering how deep and big this game already was, and how many hours we’ve all spent in it, that’s pretty much all you can ask for.
- Pissing off cancer. If all of Dropout Presents’ stand-up specials are as fun as this one from Hank Green, we’re in for a great run of new comedy. Green is funny and goofy as ever and extremely Hank Green-y here. It’s an hour you won’t regret.
- The Xreal Beam Pro. Such a fun and different idea about how smart glasses should work: instead of trying to bake everything into the glasses themselves, Xreal pulls all the smart features and software into a separate, fairly cheap smartphone-like device. I’m excited to test this one out.
- Failed: The Vape Wars. The Juul story could forever be one of the strangest things to ever happen in Silicon Valley. This podcast delves into that story, along with the confusing social debate about vaping, the government’s struggle to keep up, and where it goes from here.
- Bow for iPad. Still my favorite browser, finally available on almost all my devices. (Android when, Arc people!?!) The app isn’t exactly iPad optimized – it’s missing a bunch of keyboard shortcuts and it’s basically just a bloated version of the iPhone app – but it syncs and works well and I’ll absolutely stay there make use of it.
- Amie for Windows. Big week for cross-platform apps! Amie is one of my favorite calendar/to-do apps and has become a lot more polished in recent months. If you’re the all-in-one productivity type and appreciate beautiful design, give this a try.
- The Logitech Keys-to-Go 2. I’ve had the original Keys-To-Go in my bag for a few years as a super lightweight and convenient way to get some stuff done with my phone or iPad. This seems like a huge upgrade: still light, still small, but with a better set of keys. $80 is a lot, but I suspect I’ll buy one eventually.
- A feeling of rebellion. An amazingly well produced and deeply reported podcast about several decades old ideas about AI and how we can use and live with technology. The story here, about hippies and capitalists and the government and big business, is a kind of technology story, all wrapped up in ten episodes. I love this so far.
- Clamp knob. The history of the clipboard is useful and good, but having a place with all the text you type a lot (your shipping address, default email responses, important links, all that) is a life changer. The built-in text replacement and personal dictionary features (on iOS and Android respectively) do a lot of that, and apps like it Flashing are mega powerful, but this new one is quite delightful to use.
Share screen
I think Nick Quah introduced me to more great podcasts than any other person on earth. Whether in the early days of Hot Pod or in his 1.5x speed newsletter on Vulture (The edge‘s sister site here at Vox Media), he seems to have been listening to all the shows the whole time. Just this week he wrote a fun story about how chat podcasts have taken over and mentioned some of the biggest names in New Radio.
I asked Nick to share his home screen because a) I was curious what podcast app he was using and b) I hoped he would recommend some new shows. I got my wish on both counts! Here’s Nick’s home screen, plus some information about the apps he uses and why:
The telephone: Recently upgraded from my trusty iPhone 12 to an iPhone 15. It seems to be going great so far; I’m no longer stressed about losing juice on long flights.
The wallpaper: My sweet, sweet son Siobhan (aka Shooby).
The apps: Calendar, Photos, Clock, Weather, Google Maps, To Do, Google Calendar, Gmail, Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, Steam, Delta, Strava, Discord, Slack, Stocks, LastPass, Messages, Phone, Firefox, Pocket Casts.
Yeah, as you can tell, I’m pretty vanilla for the most part. All instantly accessible apps are things I encounter with some regularity on any given day. Google Maps for navigation (and browsing). To Do to get my brain in order. TikTok and Instagram for something to do in the bathroom. I’m gaming a lot more these days, so I’m constantly checking Steam for deals. Strava, because somehow I became a great runner. I’ve also been dealing with Delta quite a bit while working through a backlog of old JRPGs. And of course Pocket Casts, my favorite for listening to podcasts.
I also asked Nick to share a few things he’s currently working on. This is what he sent back:
- I’m a big rewatcher/replayer of things, and for whatever reason, it’s usually summer when I do my annual revisits. Right now I’m working my way through it Stop and catch fire for the sixth time. Gosh, that show is so beautiful. It’s the 10th anniversary, you know?
- Like the rest of the universe right now, it seems I’m digging Chappell Roan. “Red Wine Supernova,” very good.
- I make my way slowly Season of the Witch: enchantment, terror and liberation in the city of loveDavid Talbot’s 2013 history of San Francisco. I find it quite remarkable.
- Catch up on episodes of My perfect consoleSimon Parkin’s great interview ‘Desert Island Discs, but for Video Games’ shows that this is a really nice historical record for the medium.
Crowdsourced
This is what the Installer community is busy this week. I also want to know what you are doing now! E-mail installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more recommendations than fit here, check out the answers to this post on Topics.
“This little camera. I’ve been thinking in my head of ways to justify it because it’s so cute, but also the pictures are surprisingly good.” – Daulton
“Checking out Ditto. It is a Nostr server that exposes the Mastodon API to its clients. So the promise is that you could take your very nice Mastodon app (Ivory, Ice Cubes) and add a Nostr connection directly to it. It would be like an extra server in the same app where your main Mastodon account is.” – Adnan
“I have slowly started following Pokemón Trading Cards again and am addicted to watching TheBulbaStore on Youtube. It’s super interesting to see a supplier’s point of view and the prices some cards are now asking!’ – Peter
“The Hawthorne & Horowitz Mysteries by Anthony Horowitz. He recently released the fifth in the series, Almost dead. They all have tortured puns as titles (in this case, ‘close’ is a British word for closed space). Moreover, the books are metafiction in which Horowitz himself is the main character and talks about how he writes the series of murder mysteries that you read. Still, they are among the best contemporary murder mysteries I have read and do a fantastic job paying tribute to Agatha Christie while playing with the genre.” – Kendrik
“I play and watch chess! Chess is cool now! There are many great ways to play, but Chess.com is probably best for beginners. And there’s some great YouTube content about chess Erik Rosen, Irina Krush, Levy RozmanAnd Hikaru Nakamura. I have to get good so that I can one day teach my three-year-old niece to be a master. –Ryan
“I really enjoy”Jet lag: the game” on Youtube. Introducing The great race, but actually good and not scripted. The hosts are likeable and the game has a fair amount of complexity. They are about to finish their season in Australia and it has been a nail-biter.” – Developer
“I’m currently reading Hell Divers II: Ghosts by Nicholas Sansbury Smith. Post-apocalyptic sci-fi about halo jumpers diving into radioactive wastelands to gather supplies of mutated monsters, and yes, it’s as good as it sounds. – Yes
“I’m obsessed with my new one Klydoklok, a digital variant of the classic analog clock. It features changing artist-curated faces and can even tick and chime for the entire hour if you want. Best of all, it has no other features and isn’t tied to an app or your phone. Minimalism and elegance at its best.” –Jonathan
“I truly believe that a home server or NAS will be useful and easily accessible to more people than have one now. More people should have their own Plex server, Pi hole, self-hosted cloud storage, Minecraft serveror self-hosted VPN. If you want to keep it simple, an old PC is all you need. And if you don’t mind learning Linux, you can even use an old Android phone or a cheap Raspberry Pi clone.” – Voltaire
Signing off
I know I’ve said this before, but I absolutely cannot get enough of watching/listening/reading about people who are good at their thing doing their thing. (The musician Kygo has a series of making-of videos that’s always the first example I think of in this genre.) One of my favorite recent ones is this video, with Zane Lowe interviewing Finneas and Billie Eilish about the making of Eilish’s latest album. They talk about process, fear, microphones, editing and much more. I’ll almost certainly never make an album, or shoot a movie, or star in the NBA, but listening to people talk about how they do it never gets boring.