Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 115, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, go Seahawks I guess, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about The Washington Post and the Murdochs and Polymarket and whatever a “Soho House for creators” is, watching Independence Day for the first time and Jurassic Park for roughly the 50th, bailing on everything for the next few weeks so I can watch the Olympics full-time, loving the timeline-task-manager look of Paso, learning more about Furby than I ever expected for the upcoming season of Version History, and trying to teach Claude how to clean up my email inbox.
I also have for you the best way to watch sports for the next few weeks, a great update to a great bookmarking app, a bunch of fun nostalgia-bait things, and much more. Also, don’t forget to send me your favorite non-Big Tech apps! I’ve heard from a ton 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 on that next week. For now, let’s dive in.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / playing / reading / listening to / hacking with OpenClaw this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)
- Peacock’s Gold Zone. This is not strictly a new thing, really, just a PSA: For my money there is no better way to watch the Olympics than through Gold Zone, which whips around the Games to show you the most interesting thing happening at any given moment. Peacock in general is handily the best app for watching the Olympics (at least in the US), and I suspect I will watch way too much of it the next few weeks.
- Raindrop.io Stella. A big AI-powered update to my favorite bookmarking app. So far, it’s what you’d expect: a much better way to search, ask questions about, and otherwise interact with your bookmarks. After trying a bunch of other apps, I’ve been back in on Raindrop recently, and this comes at the perfect time.
- Super Nintendo. I really don’t think there’s another company quite like Nintendo. Keza MacDonald’s book is a business story, a game story, and more besides — I’ve only just started reading it and I’ve already learned a ton. (Stay tuned, by the way: we have an excertp from the book running on the site on Monday.)
- Codex for Mac. OpenAI’s answer to Claude Code got a desktop app, and I’ve been hearing pretty good things about it. I’m particularly intrigued by the Automations feature, which I intend to use to help clean up my Downloads folder every week or so.
- The Muppet Show. The Muppets were such a big part of my childhood, and it’s so weird that my own kids have barely seen them. This new special is both modern — Sabrina Carpenter and Seth Rogen are in it! — and perfectly timeless. I’m going to make my kids watch it 65,000 times.
- “You are being misled about renewable energy technology.” After hearing Alec on the great State of the Workflow series, I’ve been watching a lot of Technology Connections. This one is rightly going viral, because it’s a rare mix of totally reasonable and utterly infuriating.
- Dragon Quest VII Reimagined. I swear, once a week someone ships a remastered game that makes me go “Oh, man, I forgot about that game!” Somehow this series is 40 years old, and though the cartoony screenshots don’t totally do it for me, I suspect a lot of folks will have a blast digging back into this one.
- The RetroVa Vintage Imaging Kit. 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. (Bummer that a lot of features look like they require a proprietary app, though.)
- Queen of Chess. Before this documentary hit Netflix, I confess I knew almost nothing about Judit Polgár, who in 1991 became the youngest chess grandmaster ever. Her story is remarkable, and so is the way chess is depicted in this film — very Queen’s Gambit, in the best way.
A couple of weeks ago, I read an essay I haven’t stopped thinking about since. It’s called “Phantom Obligation,” and starts with a really fun question: Why do RSS readers look like email clients? The essay, by Terry Godier, is a fascinating argument about how we structure and consume information, why decades-old ideas about interfaces need to be rethought, and why we need to run from the feeling that inboxes provide.
Terry’s essay went kind of viral, especially when it turned out he was building an app called Current he hoped might be a better take on the medium. (Not to brag, but he promised to get me in the TestFlight.) This week, he also wrote a thoughtful essay about the state of podcasts, and it turns out has some thoughts there too. I like the way he thinks about products in general, so I asked him to share his homescreen to get a sense of what else he likes.
Here’s Terry’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 17 Pro Max.
The wallpaper: On the lockscreen: just a sweet, impossible, obviously-not-real outer space image of the moon as seen from a mountain range with no atmosphere whatsoever. On the homescreen: nothing, nada. Just solid black, which is either every color combined or no colors at all. I’m not confident which it is, but it’s probably one of them.
The apps: Find My, Fastmail, Fantastical, ChatGPT, Claude, Carrot Weather, Photos, Things, Reddit, Instagram, Margin, Current, Ivory, Are.na, Bear, Recollect, Phone, Messages, Safari.
I have a home folder on the top left which has all of my various home automation apps (I’m too lazy to complete my HomeAssistant rig). Then Find My, because my kids love to see where Mom is and how long it’ll be before she gets home. Fastmail, which is my email provider; Fantastical, which I use because it’s nice to be able to put in calendar notifications with natural language and my house runs on calendar invites.
The media folder contains things like Nugs (sweet streaming concert videos), Music, Patreon, etc. There’s also my two handy robot friends ChatGPT and Claude… and Carrot Weather, which is pretty much a robot, actually, so I guess I have three robot friends. And two notes apps, Bear (a classic) and Recollect.fyi, which is something my friend Jon made that I adore (it’s a PWA!)
I also asked Terry to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:
Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email [email protected] 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 took an old mini desktop PC and threw Batocera on it so that I can play emulated games with a nice front end, and earn RetroAchievements while playing some old classics!” — Chris
“Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire trilogy, which is regarded as the best series of Star Wars books. Absolutely loved it, and highly recommend it to people who appreciate the franchise, specifically the Audible audiobooks that are complete with voice acting, sound effects, and a John Williams soundtrack!” — Noah
“I started using this app called Fitera to track my workouts. If you were using Apple Notes to track workouts and then importing them to Microsoft Excel manually at home to visualize, then this solves that (very niche, albeit real) problem. Oh and the app design is gorgeous and reminds me a lot of FoodNoms.” — Athan
“Watching the new series of Um, Actually on Dropout, as well as rewatching some of my other Dropout top shows (Game Changer, VIP, etc.). Did I mention how much I love Dropout?” — Andrew
“Switching to Linux Mint has removed all the Windows bloat and breathed new life into my eight-year-old laptop; it’s so much faster and pleasant to use now (and no start menu ads!).” — Sleepy
“I’d like to recommend the podcast / YouTube channel BS Phototime. It features two accomplished and intelligent photographers, Sissi Lu and Birgit Buchart. With only three episodes to date, they’re still finding their footing, but the decidedly less gear-focused / specs-driven conversations that focus more on the art of photography is refreshing.” — Mark
“Watching Wonder Man! It feels like the LA LA Land of Marvel” — Jeremy
“I’m reading Chronicles of a Liquid Society, the last book from Umberto Eco. A collection of his editorials that read like blog posts. They range from 2000 onward, so some of the topics are now quaint (like the implausible idea in 2004 that every kid has a computer in class).” — Rich
Last week, thanks to Chris Mims, I spent some time on the BBC Archive’s YouTube channel. This evidently convinced the YouTube algorithm that all I want is really old TV segments — and honestly, it was correct.
When I haven’t been enjoying a treasure trove of well-curated clips from the old Top Gear crew, I’ve been watching a ton of old news clips from the early days of personal computing and the internet. Nearly all of them pre-date anything I remember, and it has been both extremely cool and extremely helpful to go back to a time when PCs were way too difficult for even simple tasks, when Elon Musk was just a startup guy and Jeff Bezos was just a bookseller, and when satellite navigation was the most sci-fi thing to ever happen to your car.
In addition to all the “ahh, simpler times” vibes I get from these videos, they’re a handy reminder of how exciting new tech can really be — and how much more we should think about the implications before these nifty new things get too big. New tech can be great! We just have to make it that way.
