Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 71, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy long weekend to all those allowed to celebrate, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about Alan Turing and OnlyFans and street booze and convenience stores, dusting off my Fortnite skills for the first time in a while, reading The Ministry of Time, working up the courage to make air fryer donuts, trying out a Sony ZV-1 M2 as my webcam, catching up on The White Lotus before season 3 starts, trying Anybox as a bookmarking / note-taking app, and seeing if the Simplify Gmail extension will make me like email more.
I also have for you a place to watch all the best SNL sketches, a great new pair of Beats headphones, a new drawing tablet for creators of all kinds, a fun-sounding sci-fi movie on Apple TV Plus, and much more.
Oh, and thanks to everyone who sent in music thoughts last week! I got a ton of good responses, and to be completely honest, I haven’t been able to properly read and respond to everything yet. That means next week’s gonna be a big, huge, music-setup extravaganza, and that means if you have thoughts on music services, favorite music gadgets, apps you love, a deep love for Victrolas, or anything else, you’ve still got time to tell me all about it. Hit me up!
All right, big streaming weekend ahead. Let’s do this.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What do you want to know more about? What awesome tricks do you know that everyone else should? What app should everyone be using? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)
- SNL50. I am very excited for the three-hour SNL anniversary show on Sunday, and even the concert on Saturday night, but I might be even more excited about this Peacock landing page. It’s just playlist after playlist of iconic sketches, monologues, and musical performances — you could easily spend your whole weekend just watching these clips.
- Beats Powerbeats Pro 2. All the useful Apple-y features of AirPods Pros, but in cooler colors and with earhooks that actually keep the buds in my ears. I bought a pair in the (slightly boring but that’s the point) “quick sand” color, and I’m very happy with my purchase. I do wish the mic was a little better, though.
- The Witcher: Sirens of The Deep. I haven’t really dug into the whole Witcher Netflix-verse, after hearing so many mixed things about the show. But this, an animated movie with none of the baggage but all of the cool monster-hunting, sounds like my kind of thing.
- The Wacom Intuos Pro. Easily the biggest thing to happen to drawing tablets in, I don’t know, a decade? I like the idea of putting the controls at the top and making them more tactile, and I like that they’re a little smaller and slimmer, but I do wonder how many yearslong workflows are going to need some time to adjust.
- The Gorge. I like the premise of this movie so much — two people on either side of a huge, deep, fog-filled gorge, tasked with protecting the world from whatever is down there, and also something something love story — that I don’t really care that the reviews aren’t great. (Or that Apple TV Plus movies mostly suck.) I’m here for this one.
- Apple TV Plus for Android. And oh, look, a new way to watch The Gorge! Apple obviously timed this launch for Severance’s comeback and the upcoming MLS season, but it’s a big win for subscribers and a long overdue move from Apple.
- Apple Cider Vinegar. On Netflix, this is the rare show my wife and I are equally into — about influencer culture and the lengths people will go to get likes. Along with An Update on Our Family and a few others, we’re building a deeply bleak genre here.
- Is This Seat Taken? All you can play right now is a Steam demo, but this puzzler game — which is like Guess Who meets RollerCoaster Tycoon — is fun and funny and extremely easy to get lost in. It’s sucking me in the way Balatro did, which is terrifying and great.
- Routine for Android. I’ve been watching Routine for a while, and it’s shaping into a really powerful (if slightly convoluted) app for notes, tasks, calendars, and more. The Android app isn’t quite fully featured yet, but it’ll get there, and it’s one to try out.
I play with a lot of gadgets. (Perk of the job.) But Sean Hollister? Sean Hollister plays with a lot of gadgets. Whether he’s toying with stuff for his awesome video series or taking things apart with wildly complicated Apple tools, I am perpetually jealous of his gadget adventures. Like, just the other day: double magnetic rings! Never seen ‘em before, want ‘em real bad!
I asked Sean to share his homescreen with us, because I figured I’d probably discover a bunch of cool new stuff that way, too. Here’s his homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: Galaxy Z Flip 5.
The wallpaper: The bog-standard stock wallpaper. I don’t even know if it has a name.
The apps: Openvibe, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, NewsBlur, Yelp, Google Photos, The Verge, Slack, Evernote, MyFitnessPal, Discord, Chrome, Gmail, Google Calendar, Home Assistant, Phone, Messages, Camera, Google Maps.
You’re looking at the homescreen of an information junkie in transition — the clues are all there. First, I’m down to just 36 percent battery at 4:25PM and I’ve barely used this phone today… so I’m actively looking for my next phone.
Second, I’ve got four social media clients up top because I’ve been hedging my bets on which to keep — you might notice I’ve got notifications from X, but no X on the homescreen, because I only still follow a handful of accounts there for news! Instead, The Verge gets its own dedicated shortcut.
Third, the reason Signal and Messenger are in an ugly drawer together and Facebook has 54 unreads is because I’m trying to reduce my support for Meta after certain, ahem, societal shifts, but haven’t fully managed it yet.
The key apps on this homescreen are actually MyFitnessPal, which I’m using almost every day just as a calorie counter to actually lose weight; Evernote, where far too much of my memory lives; and Home Assistant for controlling things around my house. Of course the first two apps are getting far too bloated with unwanted features, and my smart home has a tendency to break!
Not pictured: Pokémon TCG Pocket, which I recently moved to the fifth homescreen to reduce addiction.
I also asked Sean to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:
- Oh, it’s catch-up season for me! I’m playing 1000xResist, which made Polygon’s best of 2024, and watching The OA, which I missed the first time around. I guess they’re similar in a way: they’re both bizarre works of science fiction with intriguing, nuanced, relatable villains.
- Oh, and fairly new K-drama When The Phone Rings, whose first episode absolutely bored me until I saw how cleverly they hid the twist, and now it’s one of the more exciting ones I’ve watched. Don’t Google it if you can help it, even a one-sentence synopsis will spoil episode 1.
- Meanwhile, I can’t get enough of the Game Boy modding antics of Hairo Satoh, aka haihaisb, who has repeatedly proven that everything’s better with an extra Game Boy Advance SP screen. If you’re reading this, Satoh-san, we want to interview you about how you do it!
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 more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.
“Trying to stay sane by limiting my consumption of news and screen time amidst the chaos going around. Reading The Wager from David Grann, the author of Killers of the Flower Moon. Essentially about conflicting reports of a real-life Lord of the Flies that transpires in the 1700s. Very interesting!” – Colin
“We just started watching Paradise over here and it’s fantastic.” – Jules
“As the topic of digital self-determination is more and more a topic (yes, here in Germany too), I was looking into different OSes for my mobile phone. I found a rather good working alternative to Google’s Android and iOS which is called /e/OS. It works really well, and I can still use all my apps. And they sell phones with pre-installed /e/.” – Christian
“Played a lot of this game called Hole. The name is unfortunate, but it’s cheap and a very good time.” – Sophie
“I don’t know if a lot of people care about this but Notion and TickTick have a two-way integration and it’s great!! I still feel it’s limited in functionality because I can only send one list at a time, which doesn’t make sense, and it’s limited to three lists.” – Barry
“Found some joy on the Internet this week with this video. It’s playing the Star Trek TNG theme song as if it was blaring from the Enterprise itself!” – Mike
“Recently downloaded the National Film Board app and it’s a delight. ‘Get free access to the largest collection of Canadian films online. No subscription or ads.’” – Christine
“After Instagram showed me video recordings from BBC’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue I delved into old episodes. If you appreciate British humo(u)r and can stand some musical parts, it’s gloriously fun. I am back to being the crazy person laughing out loud on public transport.” – Sinan
“I recently discovered Bear Blog, it’s a cool minimalistic blogging platform with a lot of customization and a Discovery page that feels a little like Hacker News.” – Sammie
You know what might be my favorite new-ish thing on the internet? Reddit Answers. I’ve been using it a lot recently, and I’ve found it to be a basically unparalleled system for getting lots of recommendations. “What are some great, lesser-known brands of dark chocolate” got me a long list of great ideas, with links to relevant posts and comments. “Are Bose or Sony headphones better” offered a pretty cogent back-and-forth debate. “What are the most popular conspiracy theories about Severance” sent me down an hourslong rabbit hole.
As with all AI search, my rules are simple: nothing with high stakes, no believing the answers without clicking the links. But the more I use Answers, the more I’m convinced there’s something real here. And the more Severance theories I start to believe.
