Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 53, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 53, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about Beyoncé and Rosanna Pansino and Bowen Yang, pouring my life back into Todoist, watching the end of The Grand Tour, catching up on some My Brother, My Brother and Me episodes, seeing if the Pixel Recorder app can replace my trusty voice recorder, and moving Headspace to my homescreen to see if it helps me meditate more. (So far… no.)
I also have for you a truly wild new pair of AR glasses, a Batman-adjacent show on HBO, a great new book about the end of Twitter, a funny twist on social networks, and much more. Lotta good new TV this week! Let’s do it.
(As
always,
the
best
part
of
Installer
is
your
ideas
and
tips.
What
are
you
super
into
right
now?
What
should
everyone
else
be
reading
/
playing
/
watching
/
buying
/
downloading
/
building
out
of
Legos
right
now?
Tell
me
everything:
Alex Goldman, the excellent podcaster and former cohost of best-tech-pod-ever Reply All, has a new show! It’s called Hyperfixed, and basically, Alex’s job is to fix people’s problems of all kinds. The first two episodes are silly and deep, and this show is going to be great.
I asked Alex to share his homescreen with us as his new show launches because if there’s one thing I know about Alex, it’s that he’s a person of many interests and obsessions. (I always enjoyed him posting about songs he made in his attic, just to name one example.) I was curious what his phone would say about what he’s up to right now.
Here’s Alex’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 14.
The wallpaper: A picture of my kids being cool on the beach.
The apps: Camera, Weather, Settings, Notes, App Store, FaceTime, Amazon, Proton Mail, Find My, Overcast, Patreon, Koala, Messages, Google Voice, Gmail, Safari.
I know my homescreen is a mess, but I have long since given up on trying to organize it. It has reached an uneasy stasis in which I know where everything is, and it’s been a while since I’ve downloaded an absolutely essential new app.
Everything I need is on the front page: from games to exercise stuff, apps for watching TV and playing music, social media platforms, and so on. My go-to apps are Notes (every morning, I make a bulleted list of things I need to get done), Voice Memos (it’s super convenient if you’re thinking of an idea or a good melody pops into your head to just go ahead and record it before it’s long gone) and Threes. Threes is a game where you try and combine blocks of the same number on a playing field without running out of space, and I have truly not gotten further in the past three or four years, but I still play it like four times a day. Just out of nervous habit. And then Overcast is the podcast app. Everything else is lame in comparison.
I also asked Alex 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
“Funny timing that you’d mention Short Film YouTube three days after I discovered a channel that’s a horror treasure trove. The channel is called Vintage Eight, which is by a film professor from the University of New Orleans by the name of Paul Catalanotto. His most popular videos are The Tangi Virus, The Oracle Project, and The Human Trial, which are also conveniently more interconnected than other videos on the channel.” — Drake
“Hild is the best historical fiction I’ve ever read in my whole life. Anyone jonesing for Game of Thrones but IRL (ish) who is also a fan of Tolkien’s references to ancient languages of Britain / Anglos / Saxons / old Norse will love it.” — Christopher
“Caravan SandWitch is a wonderful cozy game. It’s on everything and is just lovely.” — Iain
“Played around with NotebookLM from Google. One fun but helpful use case is to take research papers and generate podcasts. I’ve been reading a bunch of complex ML papers as an engineering student, so I convert them into podcasts and listen on my commute. Certainly interesting TTS application.” — Kruti
“In the most recent newsletters, someone recommended the No Rolls Barred YouTube channel but neglected to mention their best content: Blood on the Clocktower. It’s a social deduction game by The Pandemonium Institute for 7–20 (!!) players. Think like Werewolf or Mafia, but more fun. There’s endless content on YouTube that I can’t stop watching, and I love hosting big parties for it.” — Greg
“With Today in Tabs on hiatus, Caitlin Dewey’s newsletter Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends has become the most dependable curated reading list around. (Also don’t miss her excellent 10-year retrospective of G*mergate.)” — Kevin
“After years of loyalty to Things 3, I bit the bullet and moved over to Todoist. Natural language input is a big factor, but also fed up with long lists in Things — kanban in Todoist breaks things up nicely. I do miss the UI of Things though.” — Scott
“It’s been great following along with RocketJump on their Patreon as they write, plan, and produce their independent action-comedy film! They go really in-depth on everything from location planning to studio pitch decks.” — Josh
“I can’t stop playing Astro Bot. It feels like a love letter to 30 years of PlayStation, and having been a PlayStation fan my entire life, every level just puts a smile on my face.” — Nick
On Wednesday, I was at the Made on YouTube event in New York City (the crowd was made up of me and like 200 extremely cool and fun creators), where CEO Neal Mohan and a bunch of other executives rolled out some new features. But forget the new features — the absolute highlight of the event was the singer / songwriter / creator D4vd, who talked about an AI project and then did a live performance of his mega-popular song, “Here With Me.” It was awesome, and I’ve been reading about and watching his videos ever since. Here’s a great GQ interview with lots of details on his story, here’s his TikTok, and here’s his YouTube channel.
To be fair, D4vd is already very popular, so maybe I’m the last one to discover him. But I figured I’d share just in case. I’m a huge fan.
See you next week!
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