The Breaker Times

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 50, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, I promise it’s not always this many expensive gadgets, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

This week, I’ve been reading about crime rings and paleontology beefs and the strange language of TikTok, watching Kevin Can F**k Himself and Trap, re-upping my Yousician subscription to get back into the guitar, doing a lot of weird stretches after spraining my finger, and trying to make the famous Levain cookies.

I also have for you a bunch of new wearable gadgets, a new Star Wars game, the return of a fabulous YouTube series, and much more.

Also, I still want to know: who’s your favorite lesser-known creator? I’ve gotten so many great answers so far, but I want to do it REALLY big next week with lots of great people to check out. So keep your favorites coming!

All right, big gadget-y week this week. Let’s dig in.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be playing, reading, watching, eating, downloading, buying, or making out of wood? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)

• The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2. I’ve had these for a week and they’re easily one of my favorite gadget upgrades of the year so far. For day-to-day dog-walking and grocery-running and exercising headphones, I’ve been totally converted to bone conduction over the course of this year. These new ones have more bass, mercifully non-awful mics, longer battery, USB-C — I genuinely love them so far.
• Star Wars Outlaws. I have been burned by so many Star Wars games before, but this one sounds… well, if not like the most innovative game in history, at least like a seriously good time. And as someone who doesn’t love an endless open-world game, the slightly more rigid structure sounds perfect for me to dive into.
• BeRreal Roulette. Are people still using BeReal? I honestly don’t know. But I love this idea: it’s the daily BeReal experience, except it grabs a shot from your camera roll and lets you react to it as you share it. So clever, so very dangerous.
• The Dyson Airwrap i.d. Look, I don’t have enough hair to say whether Bluetooth connectivity for “personalized curling routines” is anything, but I do know that every single person I know with an Airwrap loves the thing to bits and will probably like the new attachments.
• “I feel as stupid as I look – Brilliant Labs Frame.” There’s actually a lot of cool stuff in these AR glasses, at least from a hardware perspective. But as Linus and the Short Circuit folks find, the AI just ain’t ready. I got way too many Rabbit and Humane vibes from this video.
• The Garmin Fenix 8. Garmin’s ultrapremium smartwatches now come with OLED screens, a mic and a speaker, and some nifty messaging features. These are priced For Serious Outdoorspeople Only, but they’re pretty compelling — and a month-plus of battery life just straight-up rules. 
• Anthropic Artifacts. As chatbots go, this is the coolest UI anyone has built yet. You can use Claude to build something and actually see it work and change in real time next to the chat; it makes the process of making things much more collaborative and useful.
• The Plaud NotePin. Another day, another AI voice recorder thing. I still have no idea if these will ever be actually useful to most people, but I’ve been testing this $169 one for a few days, and it’s pretty good at transcribing and summarizing whatever nonsense I say into it all day. (And speaking of AI notes: Cleft Notes, one of my favorites, officially launched on iOS this week.)
• “The Sustained Two-Shot.” I mentioned my love for Every Frame a Painting a few weeks ago, and now they’re back! I get the sense this next series is going to be very meta since the EFAP duo is making their own film, and I’m extremely here for it.

We made it to Installer 50! The first anniversary of Installer was two weeks ago, a fact I missed entirely. Thank you so much to everyone who has signed up, clicked links, sent me recommendations, yelled at me about typos and formatting, and made life in the Installerverse incredibly fun over the last year (and two weeks). I have big plans for year two and hopefully lots and lots of fun stuff to share.

My plan has always been to share my own setup in this space every 25 issues, which works out to about every six months. It’s a good chance to take stock of my own setup and systems, but also to share what I’m learning and discovering as Installer’s Downloader-in-Chief. (Here’s my previous setup, from Installer #25.)

So here’s my homescreen as it is right now, plus some info on the apps I’m using and why:

The phone: iPhone 15 Pro, with a screen increasingly scratched to bits and that will hopefully be replaced — either by an iPhone 16 or a Pixel 9, depending on how the next few weeks go — this fall.

The wallpaper: Still my wife and son on the lockscreen, but a new picture of the little dude on the homescreen. I’ve been running the iOS 18 beta all summer, which means I’m finally free from the stupid app grid, which made lots of new photos into plausible options. This one’s my fave.

The apps: Readwise Reader, Kindle, Maps, Day One, Spotify, Phone, Pocket Casts, Camera, Messages, Fantastical, Capacities, Arc.

I have become a custom icon convert, and there’s just no going back. This pack is the Vera Icon Pack from Vuk Andric, which I bought for $4 and like very much. Dark icons are the best icons.

My most-used apps haven’t really changed since last time, except I have fewer of them on the screen now. 

• I’m in the midst of my longest journaling streak of all time in Day One, and it’s entirely because I changed the daily prompt to “what did you do today?” which feels so much lower-stakes than most journaling that I find myself doing it much more happily. 
• I am desperately trying to quit Spotify, which has gotten bloated and expensive and just worse over time. I don’t know where to go yet… but I’m working on that.
• The Calendar widget is from Apple Calendar because all the other calendar apps I tried required me to open them too often just to refresh the widget. This one’s not beautiful, but it’s at least up to date.
• The “Comms” and “Content” folders are working really well for me. Any kind of communication: Comms! (Comms is also the only folder allowed to have badges or notifications.) All my news / games / endless scrolling apps go in Content. I use Spotlight search for everything else.
• I’m like two weeks into testing Capacities for all my notes and projects, and so far, my review is “it’s Notion but uglier but way faster.” I’m into it so far.

I share every week what I’m into right now, but here are a few I don’t think I’ve mentioned here recently that I highly recommend:

• I love Tom Wolfe’s writing but somehow had never read The Right Stuff before. Good lord is this book great. (It’s about astronauts and fighter pilots and what it takes to decide to risk your life for the skies.) Apparently, some of the details are, ahem, slightly overdone, but even if it’s pure fiction, it’s still a heck of a story.
• I started watching Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE more or less by accident, walking into the room right after my wife started it. But this K-pop competition show, which turns out to actually be about fandom and fame and the internet and in places gets deeply bleak and hard to watch, hooked me immediately, and I’ve been thinking about it nonstop all week.
• I used to play a lot of Retro Bowl — probably too much Retro Bowl — on my phone. Now I’m trying to do less of everything on my phone, so I dropped $5 on the Switch version of the game. Bigger screen, better controls, same absurdly fun game. No notes.

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 than I could fit here, check out the replies to this post on Threads.

“As a fellow nerd who keeps dreaming of the ideal note-taking setup, I can’t believe I’ve never seen anyone recommend Emacs to you, and especially the built-in Org-mode. It’s endlessly customizable, it’s super flexible, and especially when you write anything for a living (articles, scripts, emails, code), it’s by far the best tool I have found out there. Beorg is a really good iOS app that supports it too (and a decent if plain note-taking app in general), and on Android, I use Orgzly instead.” — David

“Match Land. I’ve been looking for games to play mindlessly while listening to music, and this game has gotten me hooked. This game uses the match-3 mechanic as a way to stack up damage for an incredibly addictive RPG that’s all about combos. And it’s got cute 8-bit graphics to boot!” — Shani

“Been playing a lot of Deadlock! It’s Valve’s MOBA / third-person hero shooter hybrid that somehow just works. It’s in an early playtest state on Steam — and does have a lot of performance / gameplay rough edges, along with a schedule for when the game actually *lets* you play online. Doesn’t stop it from being fun, though, and I love Bebop now, so it’s worth it.” — Arthur

“Somehow Ryan George made the perfect comedy skit about Elon’s ownership of Twitter. I’ve watched this so many times this week.” — Jordan

“I recently accomplished something truly the Vergiest thing ever (and maybe a little crazy): merging the Mac and Samsung ecosystems! Here’s the breakdown. NearDrop is AirDrop, but for Android and Mac. It even works both ways (with a little trick to initiate transfers from Mac to Android by mimicking sharing a file from another Android phone to make it visible to the Mac). Parallels lets me run Windows on my Mac, and Phone Link provides seamless copy-paste between devices. I can even cast multiple apps from my phone / tablet to the Mac’s screen with drag-and-drop support! Mirrcast on Tab S9: Turns my tablet into a second display for the Mac AND routes audio through my Buds 3 Pro. The perfect seamless auto audio switching between the Mac and my Phone!” — Khalil

“I’m loving Terminus on my Steam Deck. Turn-based zombie survival game that just released out of Early Access.” – Justin

“I found this podcast’s perspective on generative AI from Australian musician Ben Lee to be refreshingly different to the usual concerns about licensing or quality.” — Andrew

“I’ve been listening to Darknet Diaries, by Jack Rhysider. This is a podcast about hackers, breaches, shadow government activity, hacktivism, cybercrime, and all the things that dwell on the hidden parts of the network. It also involves physical penetration testing, social engineering, and hardware hacking for fun.” — Sinan

“For people who have time and are wanting to tidy up their personal file organization, I would strongly recommend Johnny.Decimal. It’s a really intuitive (to me, at least) way of keeping files organized, and he’s just launched a quick start pack to help people get into the system. Also, his website is pretty cool.” — Nathan

“I cannot recommend the latest Waveform episode enough, one of the best explainers for the concept of the fediverse and its protocols.” — Filip

First of all, thanks to everyone who said you’d be down for Installer Fantasy Football next year. I’m in! Let’s do it — it’ll be bonkers. Time to start prepping.

Second of all, a special shoutout to Jim, who sent me an email about their fantasy setup that absolutely filled me with joy. Here it is because this is how it’s done:

“It’s far from perfect, and I’m not sure it saves me any time.  However, it’s well organized, and I’ve learned a lot along the way. All of the data is contained in Google Sheets.  I use App Scripts to import all of the data:

• I use APIs to import my various fantasy teams from Yahoo, Sleeper, and ESPN.  This gives me access to rosters, transactions, standings and free agents/waivers
• I scrape data from various websites (FantasyPros, Ourlads, Pro Football Reference) directly via Apps Scripts
• Some site are a bit too complicated to navigate for Apps Scripts, so I use Python to scrape those and create a CSV which I import to Google Sheets
• Lastly, I use various R libraries (nflreadr, nflfastr, ffanalytics, ffscrapr) to download and manipulate the ridiculous amount of data that they make available. I export those to CSV as well and import to Google Sheets

It’s a complicated process, but I use MacOS Automator and Google Apps Script Triggers to automate most of it.  It only requires a couple of weekly mouse clicks to update all of the data.”

You are all my people. This rules.