Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 47, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about Skibidi Toilet and the future of mall brands and the legacy of Bell Labs, watching Dirty Pop and catching up on Cobra Kai, downloading every single podcast episode mentioned in this excellent Reddit thread, writing stuff down with Napkin, and trying desperately to figure out what I forgot to pack for vacation. I’ve also been trying new blueberry muffin recipes all week — thanks to everyone who sent me one!
Speaking of which: As I mentioned last week, Installer is taking a summer break. I’m going to go sit outside and stare at trees for a couple of weeks. (If you have good fun books I should read, by the way, please send them my way.) I’ll be back here August 17th with a big catch-up Installer, but I hope you have a great couple of weeks, and keep telling me about everything you’re into!
Before I go, I also have for you a new way to use Apple Maps, an interesting interview with Mark Zuckerberg, the best way to watch the Olympics, some of the internet’s best and silliest websites, and much more. Let’s do it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be reading, watching, playing, snacking on, or listening to? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)
The Drop
- Peacock’s Olympics Multiview. Peacock is doing ~ the most ~ for the Olympics this year. Personalized highlights! AI Al Michaels! The Gold Zone! But I’ll be spending the next two weeks locked to the Multiview. Four events at a time, and I get to pick which one gets the audio? That’s the future of TV right there.
- The Asus ROG Ally X. A Windows gaming handheld that is fast, comfortable, and quiet? That’s the dream right there. Except Windows still stinks on the tiny screen, and $800 is a lot for this thing. But still! We’re making progress!
- Apple Maps for web. Apple’s new beta Maps tool is a stark, simple, lovely contrast to the cluttered mess of Google Maps. It’ll be interesting to see how much Apple tries to do here — Maps is great for navigation but rough for place discovery, but maybe this is a sign Apple wants to fix that.
- Capacities. I’ve been messing with this superpowerful note-taking app for a while, and I really like the way Capacities organizes things. Now there’s a mobile app, too, which makes it much easier to get stuff into the system. It’s definitely a power-user tool, but I’m liking it a lot.
- “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s AI Era.” A long, unusually thoughtful interview with Mark Zuckerberg, in which Zuck has a very funny tan but also some really interesting thoughts on AI, AR, and how we think about the real world and the internet going forward. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed watching this.
- Llama 3.1. The occasion for that Zuckerberg interview was the launch of Meta’s new AI model, which is apparently better and faster in the way that every new model now is the best and fastest. But the combination of the open-source approach here, and Meta’s shockingly popular Meta AI bot, means Llama is legit one to watch.
- The Elgato Stream Deck XLR Dock. If you use an external mic for video calls, streaming, podcasting, whatever, this dock / Stream Deck combo might be the best simple USB setup I’ve ever seen. I bought one immediately.
- Deadpool & Wolverine. Right now, it looks like Twisters might be the movie of the summer. I’m a little nervous about this one, which has been so hyped and overexposed, but I still have high hopes for two of my favorite Marvel characters.
- “How sci-fi has changed over the last 70 years, analyzed with data.” You should really read and watch everything The Pudding does. But this one feels particularly Installer-y — an analysis of hundreds of sci-fi flicks to try and figure out how we think about the future, the obstacles we think we’ll have to overcome, and more. The main modern villain? Society.
- The Tiny Awards. An annual competition for the best of the “personal internet,” which doubles as just a long list of really fun, often silly, always delightful websites. Infinite Craft, which I’ve mentioned here before, is just one of this year’s great nominees.
Screen share
Even if you don’t know Josh Rubin, there’s a good chance you know That Vision Pro Photo. The one with the guy in the impossibly cool hoodie, making the Vision Pro look like an extremely futuristic piece of streetwear and not a silly giant headset? Yeah, that was Josh Rubin.
When he’s not looking like a gadget model, Josh is the co-founder of Cool Hunting, a long-running compendium of just deeply awesome stuff. I’ve been a reader forever, so when Josh posted his homescreen running the new and much more customizable iOS 18 beta, I immediately reached out and told him he needed to share with the rest of us.
Here’s Josh’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 15 Pro Max, Titanium, no case.
The wallpaper: I keep my homescreen wallpaper black, as I find most wallpapers are too visually distracting and disharmonious with the app icons.
The apps: Settings, App Store, Safari, Notion, Todoist, Perplexity, Phone, Messages, Edison Mail.
With the iOS 18 beta, I’m so happy to finally have more control over app and widget layout. For my first two screens, I’m balancing utility and aesthetics, which is kind of a life philosophy, to be honest. The dock holds phone, messages, and email, which are obvious. I’m a photographer and often use the native iPhone camera app, though there are many others I use in different cases, so the last dock item is a folder of camera and photo editing apps. On screen one, the vertical column of widgets are each stacks for quickly glancing info I need regularly, and the right column of apps are the ones I tend to use most often. Screen two is optimized for right-handed use, with the apps and folders all within thumb’s reach and one widget stack glanceable in the upper-left corner; there’s a color harmony that’s considered as well. Some notes on the apps and widget stacks of note:
Screen One: The first widget stack is showing Hello Weather, which uses the Apple Weather (RIP Dark Sky) data and has great widget options. Also in that stack are Ventusky, Weather Strip, and Lumy because often the best way to visualize weather info is actually weather-dependent. The second stack is Fantastical and includes the month views shown as well as a day view and up-next view. Also in there is my next flight info via Flighty (I travel a lot). Last stack is Google Search and Google Maps. Notion is essential for notes and project status tracking. I’m using Perplexity to research stuff more than Google these days and love that, of all the AI tools out there, they attribute their info to linked pages, which makes fact-checking easy.
Screen Two: The widget is my Oura sleep data, which is there more because I like the way it looks. Also in that stack are Apple Fitness activity rings and Apple Health vitals. Retro is a clean, simple, basic photo sharing app that I use with friends only. It’s reminiscent of the earliest days of Instagram.
I also asked Josh to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he shared:
- I’m not a gamer at all, but ever since trying Blackbox on Vision Pro, I’ve been loving how it blends art and play.
- I just made Hashi (chopsticks) in a workshop with Seral Wood and Steel at the SingleThread farm shop and am suddenly enamored with woodworking.
- Snoopy. Have been obsessed forever and love that Peanuts-related stuff is on the rise.
Crowdsourced
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.
“The Lord of the Rings audiobooks narrated by Andy Serkis. I have tried many times to get into those books (loved the Hobbit book and the OG LOTR movies) but couldn’t get it. Now that Andy Serkis narrates The Hobbit, LOTR, and The Silmarillion, I’ve blown through the first two books in a week each.” — Harrison
“A slightly lesser known but lovely (Scandinavian design, what do you expect) weather app alternative is Yr. They have a great app for iOS and Android, interesting background on their data setup… and look at that wonderful URL! Plus, did I mention Scandinavian design? Check those beautiful typefaces.” — James
“I accidentally started googling for a screen-less Steam Deck and fell into a Linux gaming on basic hardware hole. A decent 1080p rig can apparently be built for ~$300. So now I’m looking for old AMD parts to build a small form factor Steam console on the cheap. (Anyone got a RX 580 laying around?) ChimeraOS and Bazzite seem to be the most popular OSes, but I have a friend that swears by EndeavourOS.” – Robert
“I’ve been playing Papers, Please on my phone, and it’s been nice to play during my downtime. The developer did a wonderful job translating this game from PC.” — Collin
“The update to the Magic camera feature on the Rabbit R1 that lets you dictate the style of the photos it creates. It totally changed my attitude about the R1 being a fun camera that just happens to have some AI features built in, instead of an AI device with some camera features built in.” — Daulton
“Olympics Calendar. Subscribe to any Olympic sport, any nation, or everything in your calendar. The developer promises active updates as published by the Olympic schedule.” — Jason
“Watching like an hour of Cookin’ Somethin’ with Matty Matheson on YouTube every day. I love that YouTube has become the millennial Food Network.” — Justin
“I’m giving Bullet Journaling a go this week. If I like it, hopefully I’ll have it perfected for my liking before the new year!” — Chris
“Finally got the solar panels and battery backup at my house up and running this week, and it’s been amazing! Excited to eventually add an EV charger into the mix and drink up all that delicious sunshine.” — Noah
“I picked up Emberward to play on my Steam Deck. I blinked and four hours had passed. It’s like Bloons meets Slay the Spire meets Tetris, and it’s incredibly addicting.” — Drew
“I’ve been watching For All Mankind season 1 on Apple TV Plus, which is a captivating blend of historical fiction and sci-fi that reimagines the Space Race set in a world where the Soviets beat the US to the Moon.” — Matthew
Signing off
Do you keep a packing list? I really want to know. I am a constant list-maker, and I find everything about life easier when I’m writing stuff down, but for some reason, I’ve never seen the point of a packing list. In fairness, my packing strategy is just to shove a bunch of stuff into however big a suitcase I happen to have, and then either only need a quarter of what I packed or somehow forget six really important things. Sometimes both! But then I look at lists like this one, and I’m like, do I really need to write down “bring underwear”? And do people really pack duct tape every time they travel?
I don’t travel as much as I used to, so maybe I’m not life-hacking it hard enough anymore. I will tell you this, though: my flight’s only two hours, but I’ve already downloaded about 85 hours worth of stuff to watch. So I’ll at least have one part of the trip covered.
