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Hello friends! Welcome to Installer No. 115 is your guide to the best and edge-The most wonderful things in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, go to Seahawks I guess, and you can also read all the old issues at Installer Home.)
This week I was reading about it The Washington Post and Murdoch and Polymarket “And whatever it is”Soho House for creative people“He’s watching independence day For the first time and Jurassic Park Around day 50, I’m putting up with everything for the next few weeks so I can watch Olympic Games Full time, and I like the look of the task manager in the timeline Bassoto learn More about Furby Than I expected for next season Release dateAnd try to teach Claude How to clean my email inbox.
I also have the best way to watch sports for the next few weeks, a great update to my awesome bookmarks app, a bunch of fun nostalgic goodies, and more. also, Don’t forget to send me your favorite non-big tech apps! I’ve heard from many of you about the email apps, productivity tools, office suites, and messaging platforms you’ve switched to, and I want to hear more. Lots more coming next week. For now, let’s dive in.
(As always, the best part of… Installer These are your thoughts and advice. What are you watching/playing/reading/listening to/hacking with OpenClaw this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy it InstallerSend it to them and let them know Subscribe here.)
- Golden Peacock District. This isn’t anything entirely new, in fact, just a public service announcement: For my money, there’s no better way to watch the Olympics than through the Gold Zone, which wanders around the Games to show you the most interesting things happening at any given moment. Peacock is generally the best app for watching the Olympics (at least in the US), and I suspect I’ll be watching a lot of it in the next few weeks.
- Raindrop.io Stella. A big AI-powered update to my favorite bookmarks app. So far, it’s what you’d expect: a much better way to find, ask questions about, and interact with your bookmarks. After trying a bunch of other apps, I’ve recently returned to Raindrop, and this comes at just the right time.
- Super Nintendo. I don’t really think there’s another company like Nintendo. Keza MacDonald’s book is an action story, a game story, and more – I’ve just started reading it and have learned a lot already. (By the way, stay tuned: We have an excerpt from the book that will be featured on the site on Monday.)
- Codex for Mac. OpenAI’s answer to Claude Code is getting a desktop app, and I’ve heard good things about it. I’m particularly intrigued by the Automation feature, which I intend to use to help clean out my Downloads folder every week or so.
- Puppet show. Muppets were a big part of my childhood, and oddly enough, my kids barely saw them. This new special is both modern and modern — Sabrina Carpenter and Seth Rogen are in it! -And completely timeless. I’ll make my kids watch it 65,000 times.
- “You have been misled about renewable energy technology“. After hearing Alec on great Workflow status seriesI’ve been watching a lot of technology communications. This is going viral, because it’s a rare combination of completely plausible and completely infuriating.
- Dragon Quest VII reimagined. I swear, about once a week someone ships a remastered game that makes me go “Oh, man, I forgot about that game!” In a way, this series is 40 years old, and although the cartoony screenshots don’t do it justice for me, I think a lot of people will enjoy looking back at this series.
- RetroVa Vintage Photography Set. Yes, it’s a Kickstarter, so proceed with caution. But: We’ve seen this company’s smartphone camera lens extenders work on Vivo and Oppo phones, so there’s good reason to believe this kit will work well on iPhones, too. (But it’s unfortunate that a lot of the features seem like they require a special app.)
- Chess queen. Before this documentary aired on Netflix, I admit I knew almost nothing about Judit Polgár, who in 1991 became the youngest female chess player ever. Her story is fascinating, and so is the way chess is portrayed in this film – very The Queen’s Gambitin the best way.
A few weeks ago, I read an article that I haven’t stopped thinking about since. It’s called “Fake commitment“, and it starts with a really interesting question: Why do RSS readers look like email clients? The article, written by Terry Goodyearis a fascinating argument about how information is organized and consumed, why we need to rethink old ideas about interfaces, and why we need to escape the feeling that inboxes provide.
Terry’s article went viral, especially when it turned out he was building an app called present He was hoping to do better with the broker. (Not to brag, but he promised to get me into the flight test.) This week, he also wrote a thoughtful article about Podcast statusand it turns out he has some ideas there too. I like the way he thinks about products in general, so I asked him to share his home screen to see what else he likes.
Here’s Terry’s home screen, plus some information about which apps he uses and why:
Phone: iPhone 17 Pro Max.
wallpaper: On the lock screen: Just a beautiful, impossible, unreal image of the moon from outer space as seen from a mountain range with no atmosphere at all. On the main screen: Nothing, Nada. Just pure black, which is either all the colors combined or no colors at all. I’m not sure who he is, but it’s probably one of them.
Applications: Search for My, Fastmail, Fantastical, ChatGPT, Claude, Carrot Weather, Photos, Stuff, Reddit, Instagram, Margin, Current, Ivory, Are.naBear, Remember, Phone, Messages, Safari.
I have a main folder at the top left that contains all my various home automation apps (I’m too lazy to complete my HomeAssistant). Then look for me, because my kids love seeing where mom is and how long it will be before she comes home. Express mailwhich is my email provider; imaginarywhich I use because it’s nice to be able to put in calendar notifications in natural language and my house runs on calendar invites.
The media folder contains things like We summarize (Great concert videos), music, Patreonetc. There’s also my helpful bot friends ChatGPT and Claude… and Islands weatherwhich is actually pretty much a robot, so I think I have three robot friends. And two note apps, bear (classical) and to remember. FYI, It’s something my friend John made that I adore (he’s a PWA!)
I also asked Terry to share with me some of the things he’s interested in right now. Here’s what he sent back:
Here’s what Installer community this week. I want to know what you’re up to now too! Email installer@theverge.com Or send me a message on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here each week. For more great recommendations, check out the responses to This post is on topics and This post is on Bluesky.
“I took an old little desktop computer and threw it away Batucira On it so I can play emulated games with a nice front end and make money Retro achievements While playing some old classics! —Chris
“Timothy Zahn Heir to the empire TripleWhich is considered the best Star Wars book series. I absolutely loved it, and I highly recommend it to people who appreciate franchise, specifically Audible audio books Complete with voice acting, sound effects and soundtrack by John Williams! – Noah
“I started using this app called Fitter To track my workouts. If you use Apple Notes to track workouts and then import them into Microsoft Excel manually at home to visualize them, this solves this (very niche, albeit real) problem. Oh and the design of the app is great and reminds me a lot FoodNoms“. — Adhan
“Watching the new series Um, actually on Dropout, plus rewatch some of Dropout’s other best offerings (Game changer, VIPetc.). Did I mention how much I love leaking? -Andrew
“Switch to Linux Mint It removed all the bloat from Windows and added new life to my eight-year-old laptop; It’s faster and more fun to use now (and no ads in the start menu!).” — Sleepy
“I would recommend the podcast/YouTube channel Bachelor’s degree in photography. It features two brilliant and intelligent photographers, Sissy Lu and Birgitte Bouchart. With only three episodes so far, they’re still finding their feet, but the less gear-focused/spec-driven conversations that focus more on the art of photography are refreshing. – Mark
“monitoring The miracle man! “It feels like Los Angeles, LA Land of Marvel” – Jeremy
“I’m reading Liquid Community Recordsthe last book of Umberto Eco. A collection of his editorials that resemble blog posts. They range from 2000 onwards, so some topics are now bizarre (such as the implausible idea in 2004 that every child had a computer in the classroom). – Rich
Last week, thanks to Chris Mims, I spent some time on… BBC Archive channel on YouTube. This apparently convinced YouTube’s algorithm that all I wanted were really old TV clips – and frankly, it was true.
When I didn’t enjoy a treasure trove of well-curated things Clips from the old Top Gear crewI’ve been watching a ton of old news clips from the early days of personal computing and the Internet. Almost all of them pre-date anything I can remember, and it was very cool and useful to go back to the time when there were personal computers Very difficult method Even for simple tasks, when Elon Musk was Just a startup guy And Jeff Bezos He was just a bookseller, And when it was satellite navigation The most sci-fi thing That ever happens to your car.
In addition to all the emotions I get from these videos, they serve as a helpful reminder of how cool new technology is — and how much we should think about the implications before these cool new things become too big. New technology can be great! We just have to make it that way.
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