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Hello friends! Welcome to Installer No. 136 is your guide to the best and edge-The most wonderful things in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, I hope your neighborhood isn’t as smoky as mine, and you can also read all the old issues at Installer Home.)
This week I recorded the next season of Release date (This season’s finale comes out on Sunday!), read about it Data center theft and Baseball in the backyard and Creator l Calvin and HobbesCancel my plans for October to see digger 30 or 40 times, considering New knockout round routes in Mario Kart WorldThanks, I learned more than I ever intended to about Staten Island Revisionist historyReading in history The first chatbotAnd my preparation Flipper Busy Bar. I love this thing and have no idea what I’m going to use it for.
I also have a summer movie for you, a great update to a great note-taking app, a new app to organize your photos, and so much more. Let’s go.
(As always, the best part of… Installer These are your thoughts and advice. What are you reading/watching/playing/listening to/welding together 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.)
- Odyssey. I’ll be honest: I was expecting this movie to not be great. The exciting director delivers a story so big, not even Christopher Nolan could pull it off every time, right? mistake. The reviews are amazing, the whole thing actually feels very modern, and I absolutely cannot wait to plant myself in an IMAX theater and enjoy the saga of this theater. Several dozen times.
- Bearing 2.9. Bear’s tag-based system has always felt a bit restrictive to me, but expanding the idea into workspaces makes it more powerful without being more complex. Very smart, very useful, and still one of the best apps for typing across Apple devices.
- World Cup final. By almost any measure, Sunday’s game will be the biggest event on television… until we do it again in four years. This year’s tournament has been amazing, and whether you like football or not, the final tends to make for good television. Treat it like the Super Bowl! Have a party!
- “How Microtransactions (Almost) Ruined Gaming, with Dan Soder“. Really good episode Pablo Torre finds out This makes an incomplete but very compelling argument that we’ve almost completely lost the plot when it comes to gaming. But the battle is not completely lost yet.
- Avira. I’ve heard good things about the new Mac-based photo editor, which is fast and powerful and aims squarely at replacing Adobe’s ever-rising tools. Getting rid of Lightroom is a lot to ask, but I’m excited to give this a real shot.
- University degree. Chris Lawley, friend Installershipped its Notes & Tasks app for Apple devices this week, and it’s done really well! It’s so hard to show what matters to you right now and hide everything else, and I kind of appreciate that.
- Download Museum. What a fun idea: a repository of all the things that have kept us waiting on our computers. View a collection of images as if it were 1997, remember what it was like to wait to connect to the Internet, and learn what designers have always known about how to make slow things look faster.
- Codex Micro. I love the shortcut button, and while I think $230 is a ridiculous price to pay for a set of buttons that you can recreate with a Stream Deck or any number of other things, I think these agent control keys are a lot of fun. Working louder tends to feel good.
(A little housekeeping note: From now on, when we create a special section like this, it will be in place of this week’s screen share. I’ve heard from a bunch of people that some issues are actually too much, and this sounds like a good trade that also makes my life easier. Win-win!)
They say reading is dead. It is actually not true. A few weeks ago, I asked you all to share your reading settings — gadgets, apps, libraries, bookmarks, highlight colors, everything. As always, you delivered! Since a bunch of you asked, before we get into all of your great gear and tips, here’s my current setup:
- I mostly read on one of three devices: A Kindle Paperwhitethat iPad minior a Palma box 2. The iPad is for when I need to jot down a lot of notes and highlights, the Palma goes everywhere with me, and the Paperwhite lives next to my bed. Almost all of my eBooks exist in the Kindle world; I wish that wasn’t the case, and maybe I should switch to something more outgoing, but it’s hard to make a change.
- As a result, I mostly read books on… Kindle appbut all the rest of my digital reading happens The wise reader. I often deal with both Instapaper and topicBut Reader’s search, organization tools, and ability to parse and turn PDF files into a great reading experience are unparalleled.
- I use Feed box To read the RSS feed. On my computer, I use the Feedbin website; On mobile I use it mostly Unread.
- When I buy physical books, which I try to do more often now that I have a toddler who sees me looking at screens all the time, I try to buy them from Bookshop.org. Or from my local bookstore/library. My book collection is growing for the first time in forever, which is fun.
But enough about me! Here are the most common things I’ve heard from you:
- Library! Libraries yay! Many of us use it Libyan and He hopes and MyLibro and Sora And many other tools to make the most of our library cards. Absolutely love seeing it.
- the kindle and iPad mini They are the big winners among readers. Not a big surprise there, really. But I’ve also heard from Kobo fans (both… Clara and Libra), and more than a loyal fan of the iPod Touch, and many believers the Extinc X4. Oh, and of course Palma box The winner remains.
- The most popular reading apps were also, unsurprisingly, kindle and Apple Books. But there are some loyal ones BookFusion The fans are there too, and Bookshop.orgIt appears to be an application.
- We love the way to track our group and our progress. both of them Story graph and Track the book You have a lot of fans, and practically everyone has either quit or is looking to leave Goodreads.
- Many of us love listening to books, and that means of course audible Came several times. But many of us also make good use of the 15 hours of accompanying audio Spotify Premium.
- Bookpopa great site for finding e-book sales, has been popping up a lot. And so I did chirpour sister site for audiobooks.
- Saving and syncing highlights is an ongoing project for many of us. Lots of Wise reading Users are there, syncing things to an idea and craft and Obsidianbut also a lot of people are creating their own apps to make this easier.
- I’ve heard, conservatively, about 50 different RSS readers. Unread and Reader It was a favorite of the RSS, and Instapaper, The wise readerand Walabagh These are the steps needed to save things for later.
Final note: I heard from A a lot Many people find that keeping up with news releases is a difficult and unsolved problem. Do you send everything to the reading app? RSS feed? Are you trying to manage them in Gmail? who knows! As you might have guessed, I also have a lot of newsletters that I don’t know how to manage. If you have tips, I’m all ears. And thanks to everyone who shared their reading settings!
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’m moving from Google (Gmail) to a great European alternative: Serox. By using a sync service, you can untie the big tech companies, without losing your emails. -Olaf
“The ghost in the shell Anime on Amazon is the best thing on TV. It’s as informative as a concrete brick, but if you can look beyond that, it’s absolutely worth the watch. — B. Carzo
“attractiveness It is the best/simplest note taking app. Most note apps, while taking notes, get lost as you add more, and lose their importance; With Gravity, you can capture any note at the top of the page. Simplicity is wonderful.” -Andrew
“Thank you Rohit for 4×3 Suggestion last week Installer. The other game on the site crushAlso great. Both are great new games from the New York Times. – Kurt
“I ordered Pebble 01 indicator bell. I desperately want to dictate little notes to myself, and opening an app on my phone causes a lot of friction. – I
“I just finished the book Seek immediate shelter By Vincent Yu. It follows a group of people in a small town when they receive an emergency text message about a “missile incoming,” then a “false alert” message about 20 minutes later, and how each person reacts during and after the alert. It was great.” – Matt
“Found recently John Lee’s YouTube channel. A great deep dive into current sports/culture from an independent perspective. Spoiler – Gambling and private equity have ruined most things. In an age of sensational shots and catchy ads, it’s the breath of fresh air sports media fans need. – Brett
“I’ve been playing with Hyperlinka new app that treats RSS (and your personal blog) like an open social network. It’s really interesting and has a lot of potential.” —Chris
“This week I was reading The Interface Series, a sci-fi/horror web series from about 10 years ago. Each chapter is posted as a comment in a random, unrelated Reddit thread, but they’re all compiled in /r/9M9H9E9. A wonderful speculative fiction that makes the most of its medium. -Andy
I’ve always appreciated the size and power of an IMAX screen, but until I heard that Matt Damon recently explained How strange it is to work in an IMAX camera, I don’t think I ever really understood how amazing and complex this technology really is. So of course I loved it this Tested video About how to view IMAX, This interview is by Christopher Nolan On how he thought about formats, we’ll delve into this Art of Death 70mmand This is an excellent explanation On comprehensive technology. Well Chris, I’m going to drive halfway across the state to see this movie properly. I won.
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