Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 82, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you’re caught up on Andor, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about AI prophets and ChatGPT cheaters and the lives of NFL prospects, watching the new season of Taskmaster and a whole bunch of Mulan, playing PGA Tour Pro Golf on my iPhone and the original Mario Golf on my Switch, finally getting into Barbarians at the Gate, and doing a lot of eBay shopping for vintage gadgets. For work, I swear.
I also have for you a great new gaming controller, a podcast about emojis, a new super-high-end fitness tracker, a whole bunch of GTA VI content, and much more. Fun, gadgety week this week! Let’s get into it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / playing / listening to / learning on the harpsichord this week? What should everyone else be into right now, too? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)
- The Backbone Pro. I’ve had and loved a Backbone controller for a while — it’s a terrific gaming accessory for your phone. The new model is even more ambitious; in addition to your phone, it can also connect wirelessly to iPads, Steam Decks, smart TVs, and more. No Switch or Xbox or PS5, for annoying reasons, but still a great cross-device idea.
- “Emoji Law.” An instant classic of a 99 Percent Invisible episode, about how a thumbs-up emoji in response to a contract proposal turned into a huge lawsuit over what a thumbs-up emoji actually means. A wonky story in the absolute best way, and a great listen.
- The Microsoft Surface Pro 12. I remain slightly skeptical that any Windows on ARM device can be truly great, but it looks like Microsoft got the spec sheet right with this one. The Pro is thin and light, powerful enough, with good battery life, and starts at $800… I have high hopes for this one.
- Poker Face season two. This show never quite got its due, I assume mostly because it’s on Peacock and nobody really cares about Peacock. (Disclosure: Comcast, which owns Peacock, is a minority investor in Vox Media.) But it’s a terrific mystery show, and the second season is just as surprising and bizarre as the first.
- Amazon Kindle for iOS. This is mostly a PSA: thanks to the recent ruling against Apple, developers like Amazon can now include links to buy stuff on the web. Amazon’s one of the first I’ve seen to take advantage — you can just click to buy a book! What a world! Delta and other apps are also already changing how you pay for stuff, and there’s surely more to come soon.
- “Handhelds (and Games) I’m Playing Right Now.” A fun Retro Games Corp tour of a bunch of interesting and fun handheld consoles — including a couple I didn’t know about before — and some fun games to play on them. I have trouble keeping all the retro handheld stuff straight, and this video was super helpful.
- Whoop 5.0. Whoop has always been a little too much for me. It’s a great fitness tracker for, like, pro athletes, but it’s more than most people need. The new one, though, is smaller and longer-lasting and more focused on overall health tracking. It’s still a lot of metrics, though, and you’ll pay up to $359 a year to get all of them.
- “GTA 6 TRAILER 2 REACTION & BREAKDOWN.” Two full hours of frame-by-frame review of a two-minute trailer for a game that’s not coming out for a year, from a big name in GTA streaming, who spends half the stream just being blown away by the graphics? Yes, please. I watched the whole thing without even meaning to.
I’ve mentioned this before here, but I have a real weakness for notebooks. On some level this makes no sense: I type all day, I write by hand hardly ever, and my handwriting is horrific. And yet there’s nothing I love more than the look and feel of a really nice notebook. I’ve been a fan of the Sidekick Notepad from Cortex for a while, and was very excited to see the launch of the Sidekick Pocket this week. There are three flavors of the new mini notebook: one with lined paper, one with a dot grid, and one just for writing checklists. The correct answer is all three.
One half of the Cortex team is Myke Hurley, who you might also know as the cofounder of the Relay podcast network and the host of tech-focused shows like Connected and Upgrade. I’ve been a fan of Myke for a long time, and wanted to see how a guy who makes lovely notebooks thinks about his phone.
Here’s Myke’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 16 Pro in Desert Titanium. I am in the No Case Club with my iPhone (although I love my MagSafe Popsocket to help with grip), so I like to have a phone with as much color as Apple will give me.
The wallpaper: This is a photo of the wallpaper in The Beverly Hills Hotel, which I took while on holiday in LA last year. This wallpaper gives me joy, even though my friends REPEATEDLY tell me that it makes my homescreen too busy. But it’s my phone!
The apps: Apple Notes, ChatGPT, Citymapper, Mango Baby, Photos, Instagram, Messages, Readwise Reader, Todoist, Notion, Safari, Overcast, GameTrack, Owlet Dream, Kindle.
As you can see, I love widgets on my homescreen, and I use stacks quite a bit. So you see Carrot and Due there, for instance, but they are hiding widgets for Fantastical and Reminders, respectively.
I find myself using ChatGPT more and more to replace Google Search. Being able to ask follow-up questions about what I’m searching for is very powerful, and often helps me find what I want.
My wife and I recently had our first child, and we have been using Mango Baby to track all the important things you need to track for baby health. It’s made by a single developer, it looks great, and it supports all the new Apple technologies like interactive widgets and live activities.
I have recently taken all text-based social media off my phone, and am trying to do these things on work devices only, in an effort to be less distracted. So I have started saving articles to Readwise Reader. I really like the way the app looks and works — but I especially like its highlighting features.
I really love Widgetsmith’s photo widgets. The built-in widget from Apple is good, but you never know what it’s going to show you.
I also asked Myke to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:
- The Studio on Apple TV Plus is my absolute favorite show right now. It’s an incredibly fun and entertaining show that’s also a technical masterpiece. Everything I see about how this show is made just makes me love and respect it more.
- Kinda Funny Games is a gaming-focused YouTube channel / podcast network that brings me so much joy. It’s an 11-person company based in San Francisco, and they produce multiple shows every day. The gang has such great camaraderie I feel like I am hanging out with friends when I tune in.
- If you’re not listening to The Rest is History, you should change that. It’s an incredible history podcast hosted by Tom Holland (not that one) and Dominic Sandbrook. They have a way of bringing history to life that I find so compelling. There are so many amazing series of episodes to go through, but I recommend the episodes on the Assassination of JFK as a good place to start.
Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email [email protected] 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.
“I’ve started playing another daily word game called Raddle. It’s a word ladder where you have to get from one word (or phrase) to another, but instead of just changing one letter like in a traditional word ladder there are a series of clues like ‘replace the middle letter with a double letter to get a time of day.’ The catch is that the clues are in a random order so you need to figure out which clue applies right now.” — Kyle
“The Seat on Netflix, despite the very cringe WhatsApp sponsoring, is a fascinating watch of a prodigy kid still living with his parents who’s about to join one of the top F1 teams. What Drive to Survive could have been.” — Greg
“Just got done with Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, and enjoyed it.” — Hobie
“Pocket Casts launched transcripts finally! Only for Plus and Patron members, it looks like, but if I wasn’t already a Plus member, this would’ve instantly made me one. This will help my constant struggle of wanting to switch to Apple Podcasts significantly.” — Omesh
“After Omnivore shut down, I got stressed and started looking into self hosting. Struggled until I set up YunoHost to self host Wallabag and Miniflux on a Raspberry Pi.” — Ronin
“I’ve been playing Kero Kero Cowboy for Game Boy, which just got released after a successful Kickstarter. It has strong Kirby vibes and has been a blast so far.” — Justin
“I’m looking at the Alfred Field Guide from MacSparky, and trying to see if I can fit it into my budget this month. Been a Powerpack user for years, but I’ve never learned the ins and outs.” — Ben
“The Pitt on Max is the best new show I’ve seen this year.” — Yury
“I’ve basically sunk my week into Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but I think it’s the biggest jump in mature video game storytelling since The Witcher 3. Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3 improved on The Witcher, but CO feels like something entirely new.” — Laszlo
I’ve gotten a couple of emails in the last few weeks that all say basically the same thing: dude, you need to jailbreak your Kindle. The pitch makes a lot of sense! The Kindle is a lovely piece of hardware that is annoyingly tied to all of Amazon’s weird ideas about software and books.
I’ve spent some time this week on YouTube watching people jailbreak their e-readers — Dammit Jeff has a great explainer, as does Simon Feilder — and they all show that the Kindle can be a much more interesting and versatile device. Also, people really like KOReader. Amazon, of course, does not want you to do any of this; it already patched some of the jailbreak exploits, and I assume this cat-and-mouse game will continue forever. But I will be jailbreaking my Paperwhite as soon as I can, and I will report back.
