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Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 69, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, get ready for some web-slingin’, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about Elon Musk’s gamer habits and spy satellites and how Bluesky works, trying Llamao for some offline AI-ing, organizing my photos with the Proof beta, buying more BonBon candy than I’m proud of, testing the Marginalia search engine, plotting to break into the new Dude Perfect office, and seeing if a $56 Casio can be enough smartwatch for me.
I also have for you a new place to buy and read books, the return of one of my favorite shows, a great book for anyone looking for a better online life, a couple of great Spider-Man things, and lots more. Let’s do it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now that everyone else should be playing / building / reading / watching / learning / writing / hanging from ceilings? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)
- Bookshop.org ebooks. Bookshop.org does a great job of supporting independent local bookstores, and now it sells ebooks! The corresponding app is pretty basic so far, but it works, and I’m shifting my book-buying pretty quickly. (It works nicely on my Boox Palma, too, in case you were curious.)
- Mythic Quest season 4. This is one of those shows that would be 100x more popular if it were on Netflix and not Apple TV Plus. I think the first season is basically flawless, and since then it’s been consistently at least very good. I’ll always ride for 30-minute, endlessly rewatchable comedies, and this qualifies on both fronts.
- “AI Software.” My favorite tech-related SNL skit in a minute — the idea of teaching things via an AI-generated bro-y podcast is barely even a joke anymore, and the cadence of the podcast is perfect. I assume the NotebookLM team is very happy about this.
- Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. I am petrified of the possibility that Marvel is going to oversaturate and totally ruin Spider-Man, the way it has, uh, lots of other things. But this? This feels like an updated version of the Saturday morning cartoons I grew up with. It’s pure Millennial-nostalgia bait, and I’m here for it.
- The Sirens’ Call, by Chris Hayes. There’s a delightful irony in a long book about our increasingly terrible attention spans, but I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve read so far and really identify with Hayes trying to understand attention at a macro level and just, like, try to take his own brain back. I have a lot of notes and highlights in this book so far. (If you want a shorter hit on some of the big ideas, Hayes was great on The Ezra Klein Show.)
- “We made MKBHD’s Dream Phone.” This is so interesting! Nothing got Marques Brownlee to spec out his ideal phone, and it does a really good job of running down what that phone would cost, how companies pick parts, and why it’s all more complicated than it sounds.
- Spider-Man 2 for PC. Speaking of great Spider-Man things — this is a very good port of a very good PlayStation game. You’ll need a beefy-ish GPU to really make the game sing, but it’s worth it just to spend dozens of hours web-slinging across the city.
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080. And speaking of GPUs! (I’m honestly not doing this on purpose.) The $999 5080 is out now, and my colleague Tom Warren found it to be… fine. It’s fine! But the good news is you can safely bargain hunt for a 4080 or 4090 instead.
- No Man’s Sky: Worlds Part II. A gorgeous, impossibly huge, endlessly explorable game just got impossibly huge-er. Billions (billions!) of new solar systems, trillions (trillions!) of planets, I think you could play this game for the rest of your life and never see the end of it. Challenge accepted.
Right before Dominic Preston started working at The Verge, I learned an important piece of information about him: he’s an Arsenal fan. I already knew I liked his work from Android Police and elsewhere, but it’s nice to know people have good taste in sports teams, you know?
Dom’s based in the UK and has been on our team for a few weeks now. And when he’s not writing about tech, he also has a truly delightful food newsletter called Braise. I’m staring at his madeleines recipe right now, and it’s… I need to move on. Too good.
Here’s Dom’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: Xiaomi 14 Ultra.
The wallpaper: My lockscreen is apparently one of the generic preinstalled ones from Xiaomi. The wallpaper is a photo of a couple Arsenal players I started using when I needed to test iOS 16’s customizable lockscreens and haven’t touched since then. Can you tell I don’t think about my wallpapers very often?
The apps: Calculator, Strong, MyFitnessPal, Clock, Nike Run Club, Google Keep, Spotify, Google Translate, Todoist, Zero, Instagram, Duolingo, Bluesky, Marvel Snap, NYT Games, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Photos, Play Store, Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, Chrome, Camera.
I change phones pretty frequently for reviews, so I have to rebuild this homescreen on the regular. The apps stay mostly consistent, but the order never does. About a quarter of the list is dedicated to fitness, one way or another, even the calendar and clock — it feels silly keeping both pinned to the homescreen, but they’re by far the quickest ways to figure out what weight I need to lift next and how long I need to hold a plank for.
Google Translate is there because I’m trying to learn Italian and make myself read a couple pages of an Italian novel every day. I’m about to finish Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and Translate is my backup for the many times I hit a word I don’t know.
There are only a few other apps here I’m guaranteed to open every single day: Instagram and Bluesky as my current social networks of choice; Todoist because otherwise I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing at any given time; and NYT Games because I like playing Wordle, Connections, and The Mini Crossword first thing each morning, one of those worrying signs that I’m getting more like my mum with every passing day.
I also asked Dom to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:
- Severance. I know, me and everyone else. But season 2 has been great so far. I’m supremely into the entire aesthetic, and it feels like a treat just to get a TV show that’s appointment viewing again.
- New Philosopher. Before I was ever a journalist, I thought I was going to do a PhD in philosophy. That didn’t work out, but this magazine keeps that bit of my brain ticking. Every issue centers around a theme — like technology, play, or courage — and features academic philosophers tackling it from every angle, but (crucially) in a non-academic style.
- Vittles. This Substack is the main reason I love thinking about food (almost) as much as eating it. The restaurant coverage is UK-focused, but that’s really not the point — I love the essays that take food as a lens through which to look at politics, immigration, sustainability, and more.
- Arcs. Root is one of my favorite board games, and until a few weeks ago I’d totally missed that its designer Cole Wehrle released Arcs last year. It’s basically the Mario Kart of sci-fi strategy games: it seems like it rewards galaxy-brain thinking, but really you should just embrace the chaos and ride your luck.
Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email 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 great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.
“Great new music video from OK Go. 64 videos on 64 iPhones! There’s also an interesting behind-the-scenes video to go with it.” – Owen
“Pataal Lok on Prime Video is phenomenal. Season 2 just dropped and is set in a part of India that even most Indians are unaware about. Check it out.” – Krishnan
“About two weeks ago my Telly finally arrived after ~1.5 years of being on the waitlist and it absolutely lives up to the hype! My one big asterisk is that the integrated soundbar and secondary ‘Smart Screen’ at the bottom make the TV much taller than you expect. It didn’t fit in our entertainment center and we had to get a new one that didn’t have any shelving above the TV to make sure it’d fit.” – Drake
“Cine2Nerdle Battle has been taking up a lot of time for me this week. You connect films based on shared cast or crew. Super fun for movie nerds.” – Mark
“I am using ChatGPT Tasks. I’ve since revised my first attempt to include three distinct gratitude writing prompts and three distinct AI news items. I’m also a Dallas Cowboys fan (don’t judge) and have ChatGPT monitoring their hunt for a new head coach. It actually updated me this morning that the Cowboys had in fact hired a new head coach. My wife and I baked a mean Linzer cookie with fig jam based on a recipe that ChatGPT provided me.” – Tony
“This week I’ll be taking apart my PC and transferring everything into a new Phanteks Evolv X2 case.” – Sean
“KTool. It lets me get my RSS feeds and my newsletters to my Kindle so I can read them like a magazine and limit my scroll time. It’s amazing.” – Murphy
“Kvaesitso is an Android launcher that isn’t available on the Play Store, but as someone who loves to dabble in launchers, it’s one of the smartest I’ve ever used. It’s so clean, super intuitive, but thanks to an extraordinary search function, it’s also SO powerful.” – Luke
“Switched over to Zen Browser. Basically Arc, but open-source and built on Firefox. Hoping for folders to be implemented soon.” – Phase
“Have made reading a big goal for this year. To that end, my partner and I started some goal tracking through an app called The StoryGraph, where you enter what you’re reading each day and it provides a nice summary, which you can share with others. I’ve already read or finished three books this month, which is a big improvement.” – Colin
On Monday this week, I hopped on a flight to West Palm Beach, FL, to go to a golf match. But not a normal golf match: I went to see TGL, a new indoor and simulator-based golf league that has a genuinely astonishing amount of new technology baked in. (ESPN has a good story about how TGL works and where it came from.) I also got to hit into the five-story-tall screen, and I didn’t totally embarrass myself!
I’m going to have a bunch of stuff on The Verge about that trip in the next couple of weeks. But in the meantime, if you care at all about golf, you should check it out. Honestly, even if you don’t, the tech itself is worth checking out all on its own — here’s a great YouTube tour of the whole setup. I need a screen this big in my life more often.
