Hi friends! Welcome to installer Issue 43, Your Best Guide edge-The best thing in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, we’re glad you found us, and you can also installer front page.
This week I read memes and telepathy and John Lennon’s watchwatch presumed innocent and Ren Farei, test genspark For AI search stuff, redo my home screen Foolish, and tried overnight oats to try to make mornings less chaotic. (It turns out that peanut butter improves the quality of almost everything by 20 percent.)
I’ve also got you covered with a new tech podcast, some handy new gadgets, a new calendar app, games that will take up your weekend, and more. let’s start.
(As always, the best part installer It’s your ideas and techniques. What are you doing? What’s a great app/book/podcast/show/game/recipe/whatever you’ve discovered and loved recently? Tell me all about it: installer@theverge.com. If you know others you might like installertell them to subscribe here.
fall
- ASUS VivoBook S 15. The Copilot Plus PC is introduced. It’s been a strange launch, and despite all the recall complications, we’re starting to get a feel for what this new age of Qualcomm-powered Windows devices can do. So far, I’m pretty optimistic, but I’m still waiting to see how the new Surfaces perform.
- Elden’s Ring Shadow of the Tree. The whole vibe of this huge new DLC is basically “It’s Elden Ring, just somehow more so.” Considering the depth and scale of this game, and how much time we’ve already spent in it, that’s pretty much it. All you can ask for.
- Get rid of cancer. If all of Dropout Gift’s stand-up specials are as funny as this one from Hank Green, we’re about to get a new slate of comedies. The color green here is as fun, silly, and very Hank Green-esque as ever. This is an hour you won’t regret.
- Xreal Beam Pro. Here’s an interesting and different idea about how smart glasses might work: Rather than trying to fit everything into the glasses themselves, Xreal packs all the smarts and software into a single, fairly cheap smartphone-style device. I’m excited to test this out.
- Backfiring: The e-cigarette wars. The story of Juul may always be one of the strangest things to ever happen in Silicon Valley. This podcast delves into that story, as well as the confusing social debate over vaping, governments scrambling and where things are headed.
- Arcs for iPad. Still my favorite browser and finally available on almost all my devices. (When did Arc people use Android!?!) The app isn’t exactly optimized for the iPad – it’s missing some keyboard shortcuts and is really just a larger version of the iPhone app – but it syncs and works well, I’ll absolutely take it.
- Amy for Windows. A big week for cross-platform apps! Amie is one of my favorite calendar/to-do apps and has gotten even more improvements over the past few months. If you’re an all-in-one productivity type and appreciate some delightful design, give this one a try.
- Logitech Keys-to-Go 2. I’ve had the original Keys-To-Go in my bag for a few years and it’s a super lightweight, convenient way to get stuff done with my phone or iPad. This looks like a huge upgrade: still light, still small, but with a better-fitting set of keys. $80 is a lot, but I doubt I’ll end up buying one.
- sense of rebellion. This is a well-produced, in-depth podcast about some decades-old ideas about artificial intelligence and how we use and live with technology. The story here, about hippies, capitalists, government and big business, is a technology story, all contained in 10 episodes. Love this so far.
- clipping cloth. Scrapbook history is useful and nice, but having a place for all the text you type regularly – your shipping addresses, stock email replies, important links, all of it – is life-changing. Built-in text replacement and personal dictionary features (on iOS and Android respectively) can get a lot done with apps like this fragment Very powerful, yet this new product is a joy to use.
Screen sharing
I think Konik Introduced me to more great podcasts than anyone else on the planet. Whether in the early days of the founding of the People’s Republic of China hot pods or in his 1.5x speed Newsletter on vulture (edgeVox Media’s sister site), he seems to be listening to all the shows. In fact, just this week he wrote an interesting story about how a chat podcast took over and named some of the biggest names in the new radio station.
I asked Nick to share his home screen because a) I was curious what podcast apps he uses, and b) I was hoping he could recommend a new show or two. I got my wish on both counts! Here’s Nick’s home screen, along with some information about the apps he uses and why:
Telephone: Recently upgraded from my trusty iPhone 12 to the iPhone 15. I no longer feel stressed by the loss of energy on long flights.
wallpaper: My sweet baby boy Siobhan (aka Shooby).
app: 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.
Yes, as you can see, I’m pretty average most of the time. All of the apps that are instantly accessible are things that I use with some frequency on any given day. Google Maps for navigation (and snooping). To do what it takes to get my brain back on track. TikTok and Instagram let you do something in the bathroom. I’m spending more and more time playing games these days, so I’m constantly looking for deals on Steam. Strava, because I somehow became a great runner. I also come into contact with Delta a lot, working through a backlog of old JRPGs. Of course, Pocket Casts is my go-to place for podcasts.
I also asked Nick to share some things that interest him right now. This is what he sent back:
- I’m a rewatcher/replayer, and for whatever reason, summer is usually the time of year when I revisit them. Now I’m trying to overcome stop and catch fire This is the sixth time. OMG that show is so cute. Today is the tenth anniversary, did you know?
- Like everyone else in the universe at this moment, I seem to be digging Chappelle Rowan. “Red Wine Supernova” very good.
- walk my way slowly Season of the Witch: Magic, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love, David Talbot’s 2013 History of San Francisco. I think this is amazing.
- catch up on episodes my perfect consoleSimon Parkin’s fantastic “Desert Island Discs, but for Video Games” interview show, which is really an interesting piece of history for the media.
Crowdsourcing
What’s this installer Community has entered this week. I also want to know what you are doing now! e-mail installer@theverge.com Or drop me a line on Signal — @davidpierce.11— with your suggestions for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For more advice, check out the responses below This article is in the thread.
“this little camera. I kept mentally thinking of ways to justify it because it’s so cute and the photos are amazing. ——Dalton
“Check Same as above. It is a Nostr server that exposes the Mastodon API to its clients. Therefore, we promise that you will be able to use the great Mastodon applications (Ivory, Ice Cubes) and add Nostr connections directly to them. It’s like an additional server in the same application as your main Mastodon account. ——Adnan
“I slowly started paying attention to Pokemon trading cards again and became obsessed with watching them. bulba store on YouTube. It’s very interesting to see the vendor’s perspective and the current prices of some cards! – Peter
“Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery Author: Anthony Horowitz. He recently released the fifth installment in the series, near death. They all feature puns as titles (in this case, “close” is the English word for enclosed area). Most importantly, these books are metafiction in which Horowitz himself is the protagonist, talking about how he came to write the series of murder mysteries you’re reading. However, they are among the best contemporary murder mysteries I have ever read, playing with the genre while also paying homage to Agatha Christie very well. ——Kendrick
“I play chess and watch chess at the same time! Chess is cool now! There are many great ways to play it, but chess.net Probably best for beginners. There’s a lot of great chess content on YouTube Eric Rosen, Irina Krush, Levi Rozmanand Nakamura Hikaru. Study hard and one day I will be able to teach my three-year-old niece to become a master. – Ryan
“I really enjoyed it”jet lag: game“On YouTube. Imagine Amazing competition, But it’s actually pretty good and not scripted. The console is cute and there’s a certain complexity behind the game. They are coming to the end of the Australian season and it has been a nerve-wracking one. – Development
“I’m reading now Hellraiser II: Ghost Author: Nicholas Thornsbury Smith. It’s a post-apocalyptic sci-fi about Halo hoppers who infiltrate a radioactive wasteland to scavenge supplies from mutated monsters, and yes, it’s as good as it sounds. ——Jesse
“I’ve been obsessed with my new rotating bell, a digital version of the classic analog clock. It features changing, artist-curated faces that even tick on the hour if you like. Best of all: it has no additional functionality and is not attached to the app or your phone. The ultimate in minimalism and elegance. ——Jonathan
“I do believe that a home server or NAS is very useful and easier to use than people currently have. More people should get their own plex server, lenticels, Self-hosted cloud storage, my world serveror Self-hosted VPN. If you want to keep it simple, an old computer will suffice. If you don’t mind learning how to use Linux, you can even use an old Android phone or a cheap Raspberry Pi clone. ——Voltaire
Log out
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I absolutely can’t get enough of watching/listening/reading how people who are good at what they do do their things. (Musician Kygo has a series Make a video This is always the first example that comes to mind in this genre. Is this this video?, Zane Lowe interviews Finneas and Billie Eilish about the making of Eilish’s latest album. They talk about process, fear, microphones, editing, and more. I will almost certainly never make an album, make a movie, or make it to the NBA, but hearing people talk about how they did it never gets old.
