Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 124, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, send me your Coachella fits, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

This week, I’ve been reading about restaurant bread and GLP-1s  and Lenny Rachitsky and Artemis II fashion, watching the new boy band doc because I will always watch a boy band doc, also watching every clip I can find from Justin Bieber’s Coachella set, filling the Schitt’s Creek-shaped hole in my heart with Big Mistakes, getting increasingly excited about The Mandalorian and Grogu, and watering my new lawn so it doesn’t die. Please don’t die, lawn. You were so expensive.

I also have for you a couple of new AI apps to install on your computer, new action cameras worth planning a trip around, a new sci-fi action game to play, and much more.

Oh, and a reminder: Send me the thing you made! We’re doing self-promotion week in Installer (probably next week but maybe the week after), and either way I want to hear about the things you’ve been making, building, coding, creating, whatever-ing that you think the Installerverse might like. I’ve already heard from SO MANY of you, and it rules — keep the good stuff coming! Let’s dig in.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / playing / listening to / storing on your NAS this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)

The Drop

• OpenAI Codex. Here’s OpenAI’s latest stab at an all-in-one AI superapp, which includes a web browser, new coding tools, and a setting that allows Codex to just use your computer for you. Tread lightly, as always, but people seem to be liking Codex a lot recently.
• Gemini for Mac. I’m mad at Google for tying its Mac app to a keyboard shortcut lots of people use for other things, and for making the app a login item by default. But! This is immediately the best way yet to interact with Gemini, and even Google Drive and Photos, from your computer. Into my dock it goes.
• Beef season two. Beef is one of the very best shows nobody ever seems to talk about. I’ve been burned before by the “we’ll just do it again but with a whole new cast” premise — looking at you, True Detective — but this is a win even just as a reason to rewatch the first season.
• Gradient Weather. Y’all, I think somebody finally made the gorgeous, simple weather app Android has been desperately needing. It’s very new and very beta, but I love the look, and I love that the whole aesthetic shifts with the weather. Insta-install.
• Lorne. By all accounts this is about as close as anyone has ever gotten to a truly inside look at Saturday Night Live and its semi-mythological creator, Lorne Michaels. Morgan Neville mostly makes great docs and got a ton of access for this one; I’m very excited to watch it.
• “Where Are All Of These GPUs Actually Going?” A very fun answer to a surprisingly complex question: What are companies doing with the unbelievable quantities of chips they’re buying? The numbers are all kind of pretend, and How Money Works does a good job making them make sense.
• The DJI Osmo Pocket 4. It’s very sad that this gimbal camera isn’t coming to the US in the near future, because more buttons, better slo-mo, and more built-in storage are all terrific upgrades. I use a Pocket 3 all the time, and will be keeping an eye out for the upgrade.
• The GoPro Mission 1 Pro ILS. This one’s still in “coming soon” mode, but it is the first GoPro in a long time I’ve been excited about. Adding an interchangeable lens mount, along with all the other Mission 1 upgrades, is going to completely change the kinds of things people do with GoPros. I can’t wait to see this thing out in the wild.
• Coachella TV. I’ve never spent much time with YouTube’s Coachella livestream, but this year’s show has been terrific. It almost feels like a concert doc being shot in real time — and there’s more Bieber to come! 
• Pragmata. I am always here for a game that’s not trying to be a live-service, battle-royale, open-world anything, and instead just sends you on an adventure. It may suffer from being a touch too derivative, but it still appears to be very much my kind of game.

Screen share

I’ve been a fan of Maria Popova’s work for… about as long as I can remember. Maria runs a site called The Marginalian, which I started following back when it was called Brain Pickings; under both names the site has been a fountain of stuff to read, with surprising and smart ideas about just about everything. I spend a lot of time reading, and on the internet, and I can’t think of anyone who shows me more stuff I never would have found otherwise.

Maria put out a book earlier this year, called Traversal, that is all about how people look at, think about, and reckon with the world around them. There is a lot going on in this book, and I suspect you’ll like it. I asked Maria to share her homescreen with us, curious if she also had a more enlightened take on all things technology.

Here’s Maria’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps she uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 16 – still too large for me, but I had to grudgingly resign to it after my last 13 mini gave up Moore’s ghost.

The wallpaper: Spring moonrise behind leafing maple in the forest where I live much of the year.

The apps: Evernote, Phone, Safari. (Blank Spaces is the app that turns the icons to text.)

The usual life-management tools (calendar, connection, climate) plus Evernote, which I have been using since 2003 and which is by now an Alexandria of meticulously organized information that just about runs my life.

I also asked Maria to share a few things she’s into right now. Here’s what she sent back:

• Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss.
• Joan As Police Woman’s record Lemons, Limes and Orchids.
• Jad Abumrad’s miniseries Fela Kuti: Fear No Man.
• The lovely reminder of who we can be in the story of how humanity saved the ginkgo. 

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 and this post on Bluesky.

“Becca Farsace recommended the OhSnap Mcon on her channel recently and I picked one up. It’s super slick and works great with the Delta emulator so far. I got Goldeneye running just fine with it after a little tuning.” — Ian

“Really been enjoying Plain Text Sports to follow the start of baseball season. Loads fast, has everything I want with none of the ESPN cruft” — Rich

“I’ve almost finished reading Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky and I’m obsessed: equal amounts of humor and existential dread. It’s very silly, very thoughtful, and frankly a very Verge-y take on technology.” — Olof

“YouTube has been my recent go-to for surprisingly good short films that you would probably never hear about or would probably get lost in the Hollywood machine. For instance, this one called Aborted was amazing and there are more like it out there.” — Steve

“Definitely watch Jon Bois’ hilarious, quirky, and informative series about the birth of the internet mashed up with Home Improvement TV show references.” — Logan

“I bought a MacBook Air a few weeks ago after looking at the Neo and getting fed up by Windows, and I bought a few helper apps to fix small annoyances I had with the notch and
Spotlight. There are a lot of good notch applications but I bought Alcove — having the notch show me when I raise and lower volume makes the giant black bar in the middle of my screen feel slightly less useless somehow. I’ve also been using TinyStart, which is really

fast and nice! These two helper apps have made using the Mac as my main computer feel much nicer than it did the last time I tried.” — Iris

”My passion for discovering TTRPGs and learning about game design has led me into a deep dive on the Youtube channel Knights of Last Call. Long live-streams and VODs and a super active community have opened my eyes to even more of what is possible in TTRPGs.” — Simeon

“Season 3 of Shrinking on Apple TV just ended on such a powerful note. The ensemble cast just keeps bringing it and the writing realistically takes on all kinds of human problems we all deal with or know about. A+” — Aaron

“I find SO MANY great book recommendations thanks to The Big Idea feature on John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever!” — Steve

Signing off

You surely already know this, but I spend way too much time on snacks. Eating them. Researching them. Thinking about them. Longing for more of them. And I know I’m not alone! So I have big news: My wife recently brought home a variety pack of candy from YumEarth, and it’s all excellent. It’s basically Skittles, Starbursts, and Sour Patch Kids, but with more natural ingredients and a lot less sugar. (But still a lot of sugar, because it’s candy. Sugar-free candy is a lie.)

I am constantly on the lookout for a way to make my bad habits a little better, without making my life worse in the process. This is a perfect one. The Skittles equivalent are called “Giggles,” which is awful, but they’re delicious. So I’ll allow it. I’m gonna go get some right now.

See you next week!

It was at about 36 miles per hour that I decided the Infinite Machine Olto is not a bike. Sure, it has pedals, you don’t need a license to ride it in most (but not all!) places in the US, and the folks at Infinite Machine assured me it is allowed in the bike lane. But I’ve never used the pedals. Why would I? This thing weighs a whopping 175 pounds, and even with some motorized assistance it’s like pedaling a rock uphill. Also, everyone gives me dirty looks when I pass them in the bike lane. The real giveaway, though, was the first time I twisted the throttle and passed a car on a city street. They were going maybe 30 in a 25. I probably should have gotten a ticket. 

I don’t know exactly what to call the Olto, a new $3,495 vehicle from the New York-based startup. It has some moped DNA, some e-bike, even some scooter. For our purposes here, let’s call it a bike, but only because I don’t have a better word for it. Whatever it is, it belongs to a fascinating and tricky category of vehicles designed to replace a lot of your day-to-day car use — spiritually, it’s probably most like a cargo bike. It’s also the most fun new kind of vehicle I’ve tried in a long time.

My life is filled with trips that are too long to walk but too short to really need the car. It’s a mile to the grocery store; a mile and a quarter to my kid’s daycare; a mile and a half to CVS; three-quarters of a mile to my favorite coffee shop. Each one far enough that walking turns into more than a quick trip, but close enough that I often spend as much time looking for parking as I do driving. I was once an enthusiastic user of rideshare scooters, also designed to solve this exact problem. Over the years I’ve ridden hoverboards to the grocery store, tried gamely to get good at the Onewheel, and wondered many times whether an adult can get away with wearing Heelys.

The Olto, with its spacious seat and twitchy throttle, is a more elegant take on this problem. A 20-minute walk is three or four minutes on the Olto. You can park it basically anywhere — you don’t even have to lock it up, thanks to both its anti-theft automatic locking systems and its sheer size and weight. You turn it on with an NFC-capable card or through the Infinite Machine app, and the app can be set to start the bike as soon as you get close to it. All together, it feels effortless.

Infinite Machine Olto

Where to Buy:

• $3495 at Infinite Machine

You can operate the Olto in several modes, which correspond to some legal definitions of e-bikes and e-motos and can vary by state. (One of the first things you do in setup is tell the app where you live so it can adapt to local regulations.) My options are Limited, which only goes up to 15mph; Class 2, which goes up to 20; Class 2+, which stays at 20 but offers faster acceleration; Class 3, which goes up to 28mph and where I live in Virginia would officially classify you as a “speed pedelec e-bike” and subject you to more rules of the road; and Unlocked, which gives you full power and says it is exclusively for private property and off-road use. 

It didn’t take long before I started riding the Olto even outside my normal errands radius. I had a six-mile journey to meet a coworker for lunch, all of it through hellish Washington, DC-area traffic. Google Maps told me it was a 40-minute bike ride — the Olto did it in 26, and I didn’t break a sweat. (My coworker did laugh at me when he saw me turn the corner, though. You really need a motorcycle helmet when riding the Olto, and I do not look cool on this metal hog in a giant helmet.)

The Olto promises 40 miles of range on a charge, and you fill it up either by plugging in the bike or by taking the monstrous 1,200Wh battery out and charging it on a separate dock. The stated range seems to match my experience, though it’s very dependent on what mode you’re using; when I took the built-in governor off and pushed the thing to its limits, it burned about a third of the battery in only five or so miles. It takes several hours to charge, too, which makes the Olto more of a “charge it overnight” vehicle than a “top up while you’re waiting for coffee” one. And trust me: You’re not going to want to pedal it with a dead battery.

The Olto is in many ways just a shrunken version of Infinite Machine’s first product, the P1, which is a very design-y electric moped. The company itself was started by two brothers, Joe and Eddie Cohen, both of whom were previously software guys (which explains both why the Infinite Machine app is so nice to use and why so many features are controlled there). Ultimately, they have plans to build all manner of electric vehicles — a lot of the technology in the Olto is apparently relatively easy to miniaturize for smaller devices, or expand for larger ones — but the Cohens decided to start with the vehicles people already know.

The P1 launched in 2023 and immediately inspired the same two reactions I heard over and over in my time with the Olto: “Whoa, what is that,” and “That thing looks just like a Cybertruck.” They both really do, particularly the silver model Olto. It’s all those big blocks of glistening, chrome metal, the whole industrial exoskeleton vibe. The Cybertruck comparison does the Olto a disservice, though; instead, imagine the Cybertruck, but done well, and about a tenth of the size. It won’t be for everyone, but it works for me.

There are lots of thoughtful design touches around the Olto, some of which seem a bit overly clever. The pedals are mostly designed to be footrests, which is clever, but it takes a few very tricky steps to get them unlocked and pedaling. There are small foot pegs near the back, in case you want to have a second passenger, but once I took them out, I had a hard time getting them to click back into place, and when they’re out the pedals whack them on every rotation. I would say this is bad design, but really it is just abundantly clear that these are vestigial pedals. Legalese pedals. Pedals so you can say “but look, officer, it has pedals, it’s a bike!” They are not even remotely for pedaling. Because this is not really a bike.

The handlebars include a number of useful controls, including a turn signal, but it took me a long time to stop pressing the ultra-sensitive horn by accident every time I got on the bike. There are two hooks on the back of the bike for hanging bags and whatnot — I didn’t even notice them until the last day of my testing. Luckily, there’s space in the foot well for a couple of shopping bags, so I didn’t need the extra hauling options. (I do wish it had a cupholder, though.)

If you think of the Olto as a tiny motorcycle, it is fabulously fast and agile. It can take tight corners even at pretty high speeds, the throttle is incredibly responsive, and the thing seems to hit top speed in no time. Compared to a bike, though? This thing is clunky. It’s far too heavy to easily pick up over a curb, or quickly redirect the way you’d just pick up your bike’s front tire and move it to the side. You can’t pick it up and take it up the stairs or load it into your car. Even a heavy, large cargo bike is vastly more malleable than the Olto. I’d wager the Olto is more comfortable, more luxurious, and faster than just about any e-bike you can find. But the tradeoff is real.

If the Olto is a success, it will cause a lot of consternation in a bike world already worried about the increase in motors. Deservedly so. But I find it fascinating: I’ve ridden a lot of these so-called “micromobility” vehicles before, and this is the most comfortable, relaxed, dare I say car-like one I’ve tried. It’s not trying to be a bike at all, really. It’s trying to replace your car. It did so for me, more quickly and for more things than I even expected. And when I’m on the road, there’s no question who rules the bike lane — just please know that I feel terrible about it.