Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 149, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy It Actually Feels Like Fall Now At Least In My Neighborhood), and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been reading about Demis Hassabis and computer chips and permafrost, enjoying the first episodes of Machine Gods, filming the next season of Version History (pet season!), seeing You Can See Everything and then reading and listening to absolutely everything about it, painstakingly updating all the stuff in my 1Password, making tiny documents with Tiny Little Office, watching Conan O’Brien own Subway Takes the way he once owned Hot Ones, finally getting properly good at CapCut, and blasting the soundtrack to The Mandalorian and Grogu all workday long.

I also have for you a new AI assistant, the most Duo-y new app for the iPhone Duo, my hunt for the next great browser, and much more. Let’s do this.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you playing / reading / watching / listening to / modding with Claude 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

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. Obviously, Grand Theft Auto VI is the biggest game release of the year, but a new COD is always a big deal. This one doesn’t sound like some grand reinvention of the form, but rather an even more playable, even more powerful version of what works. I was particularly excited to hear that the campaign mode is a huge improvement this time.
• The Blink Mini 4K. Ring cameras get a lot more shine, but Amazon’s cheaper brand also makes some pretty good stuff. This one’s part of a whole new lineup of devices, but $80 for a 4K camera with two-way audio and plenty of smart security features? Not a bad deal.
• JustWatch TV. As streaming services get incessantly more expensive, I’m starting to bail on some paid services and spend more time on the free ones. JustWatch’s new service is surprisingly well-stocked out of the gate — I suspect they’ve been watching what people search for, and making some smart content bets.
• Claude Duet. Here’s Anthropic’s answer to Muse, Instinct, and Dots. Duet seems to be focused on helping you get stuff done at work by making to-do lists, coordinating meetings, and compiling data for you. Still waitlist-only right now, but it’ll be interesting to see if it’s as thirsty for attention as Muse is.
• Wildwood. Before you see this gorgeous, by all accounts excellent stop-motion movie, read everything you can about how it was made. Not a pixel of generative AI in sight, just an unbelievable amount of hard work and human creativity. Humans rock, artists rock, this movie rocks.
• The Teenage Engineering EP-35. When you go to buy this thing, it’s technically called “Life is fantastic!” Which, sure. This thing is a battery powered, multi-input, multi-instrument amp with lots of effects. As always, it is extremely cool-looking. I have no use for it, and I want it quite badly.
• Nintendo Switch Sports Resort. Nintendo basically hasn’t changed the formula here since Wii Sports from two decades ago, and I have absolutely no problem with that. Anything that gives me that super-active tennis and bowling (plus volleyball, boxing, thumb wrestling, and more) is a win in my book.
• Delta 2.0. The next couple of weeks are going to be full of interesting app updates as developers try to figure out what to make of Apple’s foldable phone. But one of the best is already available; Delta can now pretty successfully cosplay as any handheld console ever. (Plus the Sega Genesis!)
• Kindle Plus. This is mostly just a rebranding of Kindle Unlimited, but Amazon put a couple of interesting new features in its $12 monthly reading subscription, including AI-narrated audiobooks. I am dubious of those, but excited about expanding access to audiobooks. We’ll see.

Spotlight

The worst news of the week here in the Installerverse is that Arc is going away. This was obviously coming: The Browser Company bailed on Arc two years ago in favor of the more AI-centric Dia, and Arc has been in maintenance mode ever since. But now it’s not just being ignored, it’s going away. By Christmas, you won’t even be able to use the app anymore.

So now a lot of us are stuck looking for another browser. There are a million new ones out there, many of them somewhere between “heavily inspired by Arc” and “a direct copy of Arc I made in Codex this morning.” I need to test a lot of them. I don’t know exactly where I’ll land yet, but I figured I’d share a bunch of the ones I’m looking at:

• Dia. It has recently gotten a lot of Arc’s best features, and some of the AI stuff is pretty cool. (And mercifully easy to turn off.) The Browser Company’s attention to aesthetic detail remains the best in the biz, so I’m starting here.
• Zen. A total ripoff of Arc, and I mean that as a compliment. Zen runs on Mozilla’s Gecko engine rather than Chromium, which is a win for anyone looking for a little less Google influence in their lives. Last time I tried Zen it was a little buggy and unpolished, but I’ve heard it’s come a long way.
• Orion. I am a dedicated and very happy Kagi user, and I’ve heard good things about how simple and resource-friendly the company’s browser is. Given the seamless Kagi integration, I sort of hope this one wins for me.
• Vivaldi. I used Vivaldi for a while, and I love how customizable it is. I eventually got it set up exactly the way I wanted it. But right next to all that customization is just a feeling of fiddliness, and I couldn’t quite get comfortable in the browser. Might try again.
• Helium. The opposite of Vivaldi, this is a super minimalist, no-frills browser. It’s probably what I need, honestly.
• Firefox. Its confusing stance on AI aside, I like a lot of the recent design and feature choices Firefox has made. I’m also intrigued by some of the Firefox forks, like Waterfox and Floorp, which give it even more customization options.
• Brave. Brave has always felt too heavy to me, and like it’s always trying to convince me to use more of its own proprietary (and often underpowered) features. But it seems to always win in privacy comparisons, so I might need to give it a go again.

On mobile, it’s easy. Quiche is my favorite iOS browser by a mile. Arc was never great on Android, so I’m betting most of us never switched there in the first place.

There are also the default browsers, of course, like Chrome, Safari, and Edge. But each of those browsers continues to fail me in one way or another, and so my search continues. If you’ve found your browser of the future, tell me all about it! Otherwise, I’ll report back here periodically through my journey.

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.

“Youth is an absolute SCREAM on HBO Max at the moment.” — Jonathan

“Todoist has a stellar integration with Siri AI that has finally made me fully commit to just using it If you delete Reminders, Todoist becomes the default on Siri AI and you can add a to-do to any project with tag AND location support (using Apple Maps saved locations like home and work!). The best part is that it all works WITHOUT having to say ‘… in todoist’ at the end of each query!” — Sajishnu

“Apple added Sound Glow to existing HomePod models and it’s just kinda fun to watch the light on top of HomePod glow and flash. So I’m doing that with some of my favorite playlists.” — Connor

“I’m reading a book called How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler because I want to get better at analysis and reading for understanding vs. absorbing basic information.” — Rhoades

“My girlfriend took a train ride up the west coast and reported that no less than four different people asked her if her 2024 Samsung Galaxy Z-Flip 6 was the new iPhone Duo.” — Nicholas

“I recently read Bodies of Magic by Freya Marske, and it was excellent. What if med school was magical, but everyone was still sleeping with each other and stressing over student loans? Then an unexpected dead body shows up during finals.” — Emmett

“I got a Framework Laptop 13 Pro running Ubuntu last month, and I’m really happy with it. (I haven’t done anything with Linux in maybe 20 years — it’s come a long way!) So now I’m trying to see if I can replace Capture One with Darktable. If I can, that would break my last tie to macOS, and I’ll replace my iMac with a Framework Desktop.” — Morgan

“Exploring the new Nektropos Castle dungeon in EverQuest Legends. The game has been such a nostalgia trip back to 1999, but new content in an ancient game is a bizarre delight.” — Alex

“Setting up Navidrome and having Claude build me a definitive ‘Songs From the Black Hole’ playlist from my Weezer MP3 collection. (It’s harder than first appears: is ‘Lisa’ track 12 or not!?)” — Micheal

“Best Buy had a pretty insane deal on a Bambu A1 Mini, so we got my 12 year old son a 3D printer for his birthday. It’s amazing how easy it was to put out a seemingly perfectly accurate PLA print, compared to horror stories from older printers.” — Jeff

Signing off

Last week, my wife and I went car shopping. Our plan was just to drive a bunch of cars — we knew we needed something with three rows, and really had no experience with any of them — and then go home. Somehow, a few hours later, we were the proud and slightly bewildered owners of a new Kia Carnival.

So far the car has been great, but wow are there a lot of weird tech ideas in cars now. I’m good with CarPlay and Android Auto. I hate how much everything has become a touchscreen. But I’m most thrown by how many features of my car now exist in a companion app. How do we feel about this? I almost miss when I had no idea what to do about the check engine light.

Anyway, I’m a minivan dad now. I think I’m okay with it. Send car tips! Send minivan tips! Send help! See you next week!

It used to be so easy to get away with things in school. The teacher, after all, was always turned around writing at the chalkboard! But then came a bit of technology, previously mostly used for military purposes, called the overhead projector. It would change far more than just the disciplinary record of students everywhere.

In this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the overhead projector. David Pierce is joined by The Verge’s Jake Kastrenakes and Stanford professor Antero Garcia to discuss how overhead projectors were developed, how they made their way into classrooms, and how they changed so much about the way kids learn. They also try to figure out why overhead projectors have mostly gone away, and whether the things that replaced them — from PowerPoint presentations to computer screens to those new-fangled smart boards — actually improved on the OHP.

This is the final episode of the fifth season of Version History, all about the most iconic school tech. Thanks so much for watching, listening, sending feedback, and everything else! Other than the OHP, we also spent this season looking at Oregon Trail, the original Chromebook, the One Laptop Per Child program, the LeapFrog LeapPad, and those ubiquitous Texas Instruments calculators. If you missed any part of our season, check out the episodes here:

• The Version History podcast feed
• The Version History YouTube channel
• Our TikTok and Instagram accounts

If you’re a Verge subscriber, you can also get access to Version History (and all our other podcasts) with no ads. All you have to do is visit your account settings.

If you want to know more about the overhead projector, here are some links to get you started:

• A brief history of the Magic Lantern
• 3M’s century of innovation
• A delightful OHP ad
• From NPR: Sputnik Left Legacy for U.S. Science Education

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 148, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you’re enjoying all your pumpkin-flavored everything, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been reading about Marc Andreessen and the future of math and Mike Tomlin and Citizens United, reminiscing about the heyday of MySpace, sending this article to everyone as an apology for my bad texting, listening to the Pet Shop Boys’ new Alan Turing album and Dwarkesh Patel’s thoughts on AI, barely keeping myself from preordering an iPhone Duo, asking a lot of questions about that “flying” Tesla Roadster, and endlessly shopping for tripods to hold my phone for social videos. I have thought way too much about tripods this week.

I also have for you a couple of huge new tech docs and a whole bunch of gadgets worth a look. Gadget season, baby! Let’s go.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / listening to / playing / throwing in the trunk 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

• You Can See Everything. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about a documentary (especially a three-hour one). The pairing of Elizabeth Holmes and Nathan Fielder, the shocking level of access, the incredible meta-ness of the whole project. I’ll be seeing this the first minute I can. Oh, and after you watch the doc, watch Josh Johnson’s hourlong set on all things Elizabeth Holmes. Glorious.
• Musk. And here’s four more hours of tech doc! The reviews here are also spectacular, and even if you’ve been following the news the last decade or so, I suspect seeing it all in a row at once is going to be an experience.
• The Apple HomeView. I keep staring at the buy button on this new $299 home hub. I’m not sure what I need it for, really — my very basic smart home is working just fine — but there’s something almost old-school about the idea of this as a sort of family computer. I’m certainly in the market for fewer reasons to look at my phone.
• The new Siri Remote. I cannot in good conscience recommend a $300 Apple TV, but I can totally tell you to drop $60 on the new Find My-enabled remote! I mean, wait until you lose your existing one first. But you will. These remotes are impossible.
• The Fairphone Fairbuds 2. I’ve come to like both Fairphone’s minimalist aesthetic and its emphasis on repairability, and the fact that it gets both into a lighter, smaller, longer-lasting, cheaper-than-AirPods package is pretty exciting.
• The Xbox Nano Controller. Look at this little guy! A pocket-sized game controller comes in handy more often than you think (makes the waiting room a lot more fun), and this one has all the buttons you’d expect for Xbox and other games. If the battery life is good, this one’s gonna be a winner.
• The Fitbit Edge. I’ve been using a Fitbit Air for a while, and I like it a lot, but I do miss having a fitness tracker that also told me the time. This one does that, plus a little more workout and biometric tracking. It’s not the handsomest wristwear I’ve ever seen, but it is very Fitbit.
• The CMF Speaker S. I am a sucker for a cool Bluetooth speaker, and these futuristic milk carton-looking devices are fabulous. I bought one of the small ones immediately, and I’m already debating a second to build out the stereo pair. More companies should make speakers that look good!
• E Ink Kaleido 4. This isn’t so much a specific gadget as it is good news for a whole category of gadgets: We have a new version of the color E Ink panel found in lots of devices, with promises of both better colors and better performance. Kaleido has let down a lot of devices, but I’m excited to see what comes of this.

Screen share

I’ve been reading Kevin Roose’s new book, The AGI Chronicles, this week, and I truly cannot recommend it enough. We sometimes make fun of Kevin for loving (and being loved by) AI too much, but this book is fabulously reported, has taught me a ton, and makes so many things about the AI industry make a lot more sense.

And Kevin’s not done! He and (friend of Installer) Casey Newton are getting ready to launch their new show, Machine Gods, sometime next week. (If you were a Hard Fork fan, you’re gonna need to be listening to this one.) So I figured now was a good time to see how Kevin gets it all done — and whether he’s just Claude Code-d himself out of existence altogether. Have I even been texting with the real Kevin this week? WHO KNOWS.

Here’s Kevin’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 15 Pro (barely works, battery life is a joke, storage is full, but I’m holding out until I can preorder the Duo and become a new man).

The wallpaper: A photo of my son fishing at the Russian River.

The apps: Voice Memos, WhatsApp, Signal, Spotify, Google Maps, Safari, Day One, Brick, Stash, Superwhisper, Substack, Slack, Town, Apple Notes, Phone, Gmail, Messages.

I’m a big dictation guy, I barely type anymore, and I use Superwhisper and Voice Memos for everything. I vibe-coded a Pocket replacement called Stash that is still a delight many months later. (Building your own apps is so fun!) And I’m running a swarm of AI agents that includes Skynet (my ChatGPT Dot, which I use mostly for personal tasks), Hootie (my work agent, which runs on an app called Town that Casey got me into), and Nancy (my Muse agent, who trades Kalshi on my behalf and has lost me $41 to date).

I have a “red flags” app folder for social media and everything else I know is rotting my brain, a “green flags” folder for things that feel vaguely enriching, and an AI folder for all of my silly little bots.

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

• I’m hopelessly addicted to Balatro, a poker roguelike game that Casey got me into. (I will never forgive him for this.)
• We’re starting a new, YouTube-first podcast, so I’m watching a lot of popular YouTube shows like New Heights and Good Work to get ideas.
• For fun, I usually stick with my hobby channels: Served (a tennis podcast hosted by Andy Roddick) and Roffle Lite (a Balatro streamer whose videos I sometimes fall asleep to), plus some stuff my son likes (Mark Rober, Bluey, Yoto stories) that I’ve also gotten into.
• My favorite new app right now is Dreambeans, a truly demented Google Labs app that sends AI-generated illustrations of personalized suggestions for things to do every day. I’ll open it up and it’s like, “Today you could go birdwatching at Point Reyes” and it’s just a stylized cartoon of me looking at a heron through binoculars. I don’t think people know Dreambeans exists but I love it and am preemptively sad for 6 months from now when Google shuts it down.

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.

“I’ve been using the markdown writing app, Em. I’m a longtime fan of iA Writer, but this plays so nicely with Ghost that my head has been turned.” — Chris

“Just got my Bose Wired Earbuds, and I haven’t felt this excited and happy for a pair of earbuds since AirPods.” — Sai

“I’ve been liking the app Shelf & Story for finding good books for my kids. Goodreads never quite cut it for me for that.” — Martha

“Made by the founder of TV Time, Bingers is my new favorite media tracker. Lots of really neat features (like easily updating dates and automatically populating a watchlist). Still can be improved but it’s off to a great start and is the first thing I reach for over Letterboxd these days.” — pegasusisme

“Just finished the most recent season of Jet Lag: The Game. Probably their best one yet. A fantastic jumping on point for anyone new to it.” — Shane

“Carrie, as soon as my internet provider resolves the outage affecting my area.” — Kev

“Doing my annual listen to Snow Crash — very much worth picking up in current times for anybody who has or hasn’t had the pleasure (Jonathan David is a PLEASURE to listen to).” — Jonathan

“Still playing Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave. Completed my first path. Just in time for the expansion pass to get announced.” — Connor

“I’ve been really hooked on small roguelikes, like the city-builder meets Balatro in Combolands and the same twist but billiards in Ultrapool. I’ve been playing them on the Steam Deck which is good with some mouse tweaks, but you need to be comfy with the trackpads.” — Scott

Signing off

I mentioned last week that I’ve switched notes app, this time to Capacities. Again. A few of you asked what finally clicked for me, and the answer is really simple: Capacities has this concept of “objects” instead of “notes,” which treats everything you save as a discrete type of thing. Images get treated and categorized one way; PDFs another; text notes another. Everything lives on its own, but is also organized by tags, dates, and however else you want. Getting this setup right is a lot of work, because you have to create and tune each object the way you want, but I spent an afternoon watching football and entering metadata and suddenly I can find things in my notes app again.

This system won’t be for everybody — even at its best it’s pretty fiddly — but if you do wind up mucking around in Capacities, stare long and hard at this page in the documentation first. It’ll help.

See you next week!

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 147, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, I missed you all, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

I’m back from parental leave! Part time, anyway. Thanks to everyone who sent well wishes and tips for managing three kids. I need ’em all. This week, I’ve been reading about McMansions and data centers and sports cards and ICANN, trying to run my life on the Dell XPS Googlebook, testing a new and very purple Kindle, reinventing my whole note-taking system now that Google Docs can handle Markdown files, listening to episode after episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, and watching all of Shrinking between the hours of 1 and 5AM while feeding a baby.     

I also have for you the new Facebook movie, a tech-related procedural, a couple of great new gadgets, the Star Wars game that is going to destroy my productivity, a terrific book about the AI industry, and much more. Let’s do this.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What have you been watching / reading / playing / listening to / putting in the air fryer 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

• The Social Reckoning. My hopes were not super high for this movie, and the reaction so far suggests it’s good but a far cry from The Social Network. (Which I just watched recently, and absolutely still rips.) Still, Aaron Sorkin and Jeremy Strong will end up in the annals of Big Tech Movies, and I will not be missing this one.
• The Amazon Alexa Tablet 12 Pro. For the first time ever, Amazon decided — and I know this might sound far-fetched — to just build an awesome tablet. And it seems it may have! There’s lots of testing to do, and I’m particularly curious about this high-end model with the fancy screen, but I’m hopeful this is the “iPad but cheaper” we’ve been waiting for. For years. 
• The AGI Chronicles. However bizarre you think the AI industry is, I promise Kevin Roose’s book will convince you it’s even more so. Roose has been deep inside the AI labs for the last few years, and I think came out with the most important story in AI: how a few executives, and the relationships between them, somehow came to determine the future of everything.
• Star Wars: Galactic Racer. It’s a super high-fidelity Star Wars racing game in which you (eventually) get to pilot a podracer. That’s all I needed to hear! Oh, and if you’re a Prime subscriber, you can play it for free on Amazon’s Luna service.
• Cupertino. The folks who made The Good Wife made a show about technology, and it is exactly what you think it is. I kind of love it! What I’ve seen so far is pretty thoughtful about some complicated real-life legal stuff in tech and AI, and the procedural setup is frankly a nice break from all these miniseries and four-hour docs.
• The Surface Laptop Ultra. Microsoft revealed all the details of its most impressive laptop, and while it’s expensive ($2,600!), it also looks and sounds fantastic. Microsoft is pushing the device’s AI capabilities, but this also looks like the uncompromising MacBook Pro competition a lot of Windows users might want. 
• Gears of War: E-Day. When it comes to raw, brutal combat, Gears doesn’t miss very often. This one also seems to deliver on story and exploration, which aren’t always the series’ strong points; a lot of people have been waiting for the origin-story title, and I’m thrilled the game pulls it off.
• Blockers. Michael Lewis tells the story of Elon Musk and DOGE, and in particular of the government employees who tried to stop them from running roughshod over the federal government. I really enjoyed The Fifth Risk, Lewis’ last book about the government, and I expect to like this one too.

Screen share

One thing about parental leave is that it involves a lot of time with one hand free. Over the last seven weeks I’ve spent dozens, maybe hundreds of hours on the couch while a tiny potato of a baby sleeps or cries or farts on top of me. So what did I do with all that time? Goofed around on my phone, mostly. Too much Reddit, too much TikTok, mercifully at least a little reading and crosswording.

I also redid my entire homescreen, because of course I did, and I figured I’d share. Here’s my current setup:

The phone: iPhone 17. I have no desire to upgrade to the 18… but I find myself hopelessly lusting after a Duo. I must not give in.

The wallpaper: Black. I am on an endless quest to make my phone less interesting to look at, and this helps. It also helps make my phone a little less blaring when I’m looking at it in the dark, which I do a lot these days.

The apps: Unread, Instapaper, Google Maps, Capacities, Daygame, Flora, Phone, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Camera, Prism, Mimestream, Arc.

A few things I want to mention here:

• The widgets at the top are Calendars and Acme Weather. Acme is a fabulous weather app, and I love the hourly widget; Calendars is, like, fine. I switch between it and Fantastical all the time. I don’t think I like any calendar app.
• The only truly new things on my homescreen are Flora and Prism. Flora is a journaling app currently in TestFlight for Apple devices, and it is fabulous. It’s simple and straightforward, but also pulls in workout data, photos, and more to give a really cool snapshot of your day. Prism is a note-taking app that is as fast as texting yourself but with many more organizational powers. I have spent forever looking for a quick, transient way to jot stuff down and organize it later; Prism might be it.
• In case you’re following my endless search for notes apps: I’m back on Capacities, which finally clicked for me. It is a project to get the app fully customized, but it turns out to work exactly like my brain does.
• I switched from Readwise Reader to Instapaper because I recently bought a Kobo, and Instapaper is so nicely integrated into the device. I like the whole setup, but also the Boox Palma 3 is coming, so my reading universe might be in for yet another overhaul soon.
• Daygame, in the middle there, is a thing I built for myself to manage all the daily games I play — it’s just a page full of links to games, which open in various apps and tabs. I might try and spruce it up and share it more widely. Send games I should include!

Before I forget, a few more recommendations from my parental leave:

• Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Maybe the strangest movie I watched over the last couple of months, and certainly the one that made me think the most about tech and AI and the future we’re heading toward.
• Tuner. A movie about a piano tuner who falls into a world of safecracking. Nothing I say about this movie will make it sound compelling, but I promise: It’s great.
• Furious. One of the most intense, propulsive crime shows I’ve seen in forever. Could barely put it down.
• Footnotes. A really cool (Apple-only) journaling and notes app, with emphasis on taking pictures and video right next to your notes. One of the most uniquely designed mobile apps I’ve ever used.
• Podcast Shuffle. I had no idea I needed this app until I tried it. You just press a button, and it randomly plays an episode from whatever podcast or podcasts you’ve selected. I use it for falling asleep, I use it for long drives, I love not having to scroll just to get something playing.

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.

“Playing StarCraft II since the announcement of a new StarCraft in 2030. Just learned that macOS will drop support of Rosetta 2 in 2028 so no more StarCraft for Mac.” — Christian

“I’m going on a 13-hour road trip, once again guided solely by an old-school Garmin dashboard-mounted GPS. (DriveSmart series; I forget what size.) I like that it’s a single-purpose device with no ads, no subscriptions, and that continues to get map updates.” — sringsmuth

“The recent Hyperfixed podcast episode about the microwave popcorn button is one of the Verge-iest non Verge podcasts I’ve heard in a long time. A BUTTON IS A PROMISE.” — MrEnthusiasm

“I recently finished playing Wolverine on PS5, and I’m blown away by its incredible story and graphics. Insomniac delivered on that unspoken promise of slashing and dashing through bad guys — it feels like a whole new level for the character and for fans of Wolverine.” — Josue

“Just saw Other Mommy. It’s like a fun amusement park ride in the form of a campy horror film.” — Kevin

“I’m building a shed. The tech angle is learning new things using YouTube, online library books, and some AI reviews of local building code pdfs to check if I missed anything. I’m probably doing it all wrong, but that’s what the fire pit is for.” — Tim

“I have fallen headfirst into retro gaming on a Nintendo 3DS XL. The catalog of DS & 3DS games is absolutely massive. Running on native, easily reparable hardware, it’s hard to beat in terms of performance and cost.  Ok…back to Picross 3D.” — Jacob

“The Ezra Klein interview with the ex-OpenAI guy and the Jon Stewart interview with the other ex-OpenAI guy.” — Chung

“I have been listening to World War II by Tom Hanks from the History Channel.” — Michael

Signing off

You might already know about the HTX Studio YouTube channel, but if you don’t, trust me, you need to check it out. It’s a team of makers and creators from China who are making some of the most innovative tech videos I’ve seen in years. I have watched their video about AirDesk approximately 25 times, and I want that desk more every single time I see it. The channel is a bit over a year old, and I have yet to find an HTX video that isn’t worth the time — even the one about the cow.

See you next week!