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Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 113, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, please send hot cocoa to my freezing-cold house, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about private garbage collectors and vintage watches and My Favorite Murder, watching The Running Man (which was not great) and Sinners (which was extremely great), giving my Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses another whirl, nostalgia-tripping my way through The Format’s new album, sitting in the audience for the first Star Search on Netflix, finally reading Dungeon Crawler Carl because roughly 40,000 of you recommended it, and spending way too many hours wrestling with plane Wi-Fi. Life is too short for plane Wi-Fi, my friends.
Bit of an abbreviated issue this week — it’s a short week, and has also been an unusually bananas one both personally and professionally. But too much good stuff to just take the week off! So consider this an Installer Lite. A Mini Installer. A “bug fixes and performance improvements” update, if you will. But we’ve got a smartphone you need to check out, a new soundtrack to work to, some smart thoughts on Hollywood, and more. Let’s do it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / listening to / playing / buying / reading by the fire this week? 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.)
- Todoist Ramble. This is one of my favorite AI things on the internet, and it just came out of beta. You just start an audio recording and brain dump everything in your head, and Todoist does an impressively good job of turning it into projects, tasks, and deadlines. A perfect way to start the workday, if you ask me.
- The NexPhone. One phone, three operating systems. This midrange Android phone (which is more than a decade in the making) also comes with Linux and Windows installed, so you can in theory use it as your primary computer as well. It won’t ship for a while, and I do have some questions. But I love that this phone exists.
- Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! A two-part, star-studded HBO documentary about one of the funniest, most important comedians of our time. Watch the Judd Apatow-directed series, then use it as an excuse to watch Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein and Spaceballs and all the other incredible work Brooks has done.
- Crossplay. The newest New York Times word game, and its first multiplayer one! Big win for Wordle-ing couples everywhere. It’s basically Words with Friends with nicer design and fewer ads, and I mean that as a pretty high compliment. I just wish it didn’t require downloading a separate app.
- MIO: Memories in Orbit. I’ve seen some reviews putting this game alongside Silksong and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which is outrageously high indie-game praise. In addition to being absolutely gorgeous, it appears to be gleefully, punishingly difficult, and I suspect that’s going to work for a lot of people.
- The Sony LinkBuds Clip. I have started to see this style of clip-on, open-ear earbuds absolutely everywhere, and I kind of love it. Sony’s noise canceling and microphones are typically among the best you’ll find, so I’m curious to see what it can do with this new shape.
- TR-49. I love a good figure-out-the-machine game (Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is one of my all-time faves), and this is a great one. You’re dropped in front of a WWII-era computer and have to figure out how to use it. And what’s going on. I’ve been playing the iOS version, and it’s killing my productivity.
- “Joe Rogan Experience #2440 – Matt Damon & Ben Affleck.” This is the first, and probably last, time I’ll ever recommend a JRE episode here, but Affleck and Damon are just so smart about Hollywood, AI, money, and the future of entertainment. That viral Affleck-on-AI clip is only part of the good stuff.
- Nightshift. Kurzgesagt is one of the Installerverse’s favorite things on YouTube, and their new, somewhat darker channel is already off to a strong start. I kind of hope every video is about pirates.
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.
“A friend recently introduced us to Boomerang Fu. As adorable anthropomorphic foods, you hurl boomerangs to neatly slice each other in madcap local multiplayer chaos rounds. Remaining the last food standing as the various power-ups stack up becomes increasingly hilarious. Our whole family loves it.” — E.E.
“Clawdbot. It runs on your machine and you can message it using Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, or even iMessage, whichever is most accessible to you — and it can do anything you’d expect from something like Claude Code or ChatGPT Codex. It can also connect to a bunch of other tools, so it can interact with nearly every aspect of your digital identity. It can even rewrite its own code if you ask it to, which can get into some dangerous territory if you’re not careful.” — Drake
“Going on two weeks with Bazzite after switching from Windows on my main gaming PC!
Zero regrets, has been solid.” — Kolin
“I’m convinced musicians have the best gadgets. Right now, I’m putting hours upon hours into the Dirtywave M8, which is the most compact, powerful music-making tool. It’s also made by a single person. It even comes with a hex key, welcoming you to repair and mod it yourself. I think more people should know about it. I’ve also had my share of fun with the OP-XY from Teenage Engineering, but it felt too restricted in an ‘Apple’ way, as opposed to the geeky freedom of the M8.” — Jakub
“Check out Hex for on-device LLM voice dictation, completely for free. Hold Alt, talk, and your words appear.” — Andrew
“I’m ready for a cozy weekend playing the Legacy of the Forge DLC for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. It’s so nice to see Henry (the main character) become a homeowner after such a rough ride navigating the politics of medieval Bohemia.” — Alex
“I’m really enjoying Alma as a food-tracking tool. It’s a great use of AI, where I can just casually type out what I’m eating and it will figure out the macros.” — Michael
“Currently obsessed with The Iron Snail on YouTube. Best content on clothing I have seen in years.” — Nishant
“I held out for a while, but I eventually gave in and bought PowerWash Simulator 2. As a result, I’ve completely abandoned all real chores around the house.” — Nic
Life is busy right now. Life is busy all the time, for all of us, I suspect. In my endless quest to rethink my relationship with screens and technology, I’ve found that I constantly don’t do, or read, or watch things I want to, simply because they feel like too much commitment. I can just look at TikTok or Instagram for five minutes, but if I’m going to watch a movie or tuck into a book, it feels like a whole thing.
But friends, I have had an epiphany: You actually consume almost anything five minutes at a time. The last couple of weeks, I’ve watched a bunch of movies in 20-minute chunks while my baby napped on top of me. I’ve read multiple books a couple of pages at a time. I’m slowly training myself to read two pages instead of opening TikTok while I wait in line; I’m about to watch every James Bond movie ever, one nap at a time. I still love spending hours with a good movie or good book, but life doesn’t always allow it. Everything can be bite-sized! Bite-size all the things!
