Welcome to Installer No. 69
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.
New Stuff to Check Out
- 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.
- 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.
- "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.
- 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.
- 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.
- "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.
What the Installer Community is Into
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.
Community Recommendations
- "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
Conclusion
That’s it for this week’s Installer! I hope you found something new and interesting to check out. If you have any recommendations or just want to say hi, email me at installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11.
FAQs
Q: What is Installer?
A: Installer is a weekly newsletter from The Verge that highlights the best and most interesting stuff in the world.
Q: How do I get the latest issue of Installer?
A: You can subscribe to the newsletter by clicking on the link at the top of this article.
Q: Can I suggest something for the next issue of Installer?
A: Absolutely! 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.
