Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 70, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, go Chiefs I guess, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about kicking sugar and NBA trades and the rise of Zyn, watching most of Parks and Recreation while I try to fight off a flu, traipsing through the Video Game History Foundation Library, buying a few of these delightful Paper Apps notebooks, rewatching Waiting for Guffman after randomly stumbling upon it on YouTube, and snacking on BonBon candy I bought on TikTok. Again.
I also have for you a couple of new games guaranteed to eat up the rest of your year, a couple of new apps for reading the web, a cool new way to consume Bluesky, a creepy smart home thriller, and much more.
And I have a question for you: what’s your music setup? I want to know whether you use Spotify or Apple or Tidal, but also if you have an app you love for managing your record collection, or just an upcycled old iPod, or 600 Bluetooth speakers all rigged together for parties. What’s your favorite part of your setup? I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.
All right, lots to get to this week, and we gotta get through it before Super Bowl parties start. Let’s dive in.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be reading / watching / playing / building / retail therapy-ing with this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)
- Civilization VII. It’s still technically only in early access, but by most accounts, this game lives up to the series’ truly epic, practically unparalleled depth and history. I’ve always avoided these games for fear they’d take over my life — but maybe it’s time.
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. Big week for outrageously huge, deliberate, thousands-of-hours games! Warhorse’s new epic seems to be a now-rare, kind of slow, truly open world — which I suspect might be the exact kind of escape people need right now. You know, for Reasons.
- “Avoiding Outrage Fatigue while Staying Informed.” A really good Scientific American podcast about a topic that feels, uh, very relevant right now. It’s important to understand what’s happening! But we all need some help to manage it all.
- ChatGPT deep research. The new thing in LLMs is models that can take their time, work through a problem, and come to much better and more useful answers. I’ve only played with deep research a little, but it’s impressive — and even experts are saying it gets most things right.
- Tapestry. I’m kinda done with algorithms, and I think timeline apps like this one, and Reeder, and Feeeed, are going to be a big deal. Put your favorite blogs, creators, podcasts, Bluesky follows, and everything else in one place — Apple devices only, alas — and consume it all at your speed.
- Tana. Tana’s been in beta for a while and has developed into one of the most powerful and power user-friendly productivity apps out there. It’s like an even nerdier Notion — and there’s a lot about it I really like.
- The Z-Suite. Tubi Originals! Are apparently a thing! I’m sort of shocked how fun I found the pilot about a bunch of rowdy youths who take charge at an ad agency. Definitely one to watch after the Super Bowl (also on Tubi!) ends this weekend.
- “Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT.” Maybe the best “how does AI actually work” primer I’ve ever seen. It is long — three and a half hours! — but it is both really understandable and really deep, which is hard to pull off. Watch it, and take notes.
- Instapaper 9.1. Instapaper is the OG read-later app and continues to get better. The newest update does a particularly nice job of managing paywalls and logins, which makes the whole process of saving stuff feel much more seamless. (So far, it’s only for iOS, but I assume it’s coming to Android soon.)
- Bluescreen for Bluesky. A nifty iOS app that re-skins Bluesky as a TikTok-like video player and actually works really well. The Bluesky videos are not as good as the TikTok videos, but it’s a really cool concept.
- Cassandra. More high-tech thrillers! This one, on Netflix, is about a smart home assistant gone batty. It’s both extremely creepy and also filled with tech I wish existed in my own house. Just less… murder-y?
Last week, in a fit of confusion about all things TikTok and RedNote and DeepSeek and China and everything, I called up Cooper Quintin and asked him to make sense of the world for me. Cooper is a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and spends his time researching digital privacy issues while also helping activists and other at-risk people better manage their online lives.
Cooper talked me through how to think about threat models online, from China and at home, for The Vergecast this week. I also asked him to share his homescreen with us, wondering how you manage your phone when you spend your days thinking about the risks it poses. (One of the things he told me on our call was that you should basically delete all your apps. So would he have, like, zero apps?!)
Here’s Cooper’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: An iPhone — I only buy them used because they are so much cheaper that way!
The wallpaper: Art of the solarpunk future I hope to someday live in, instead of the cyberpunk dystopia we currently live in.
The apps: Settings, Calendar, Apple Maps, Feedly, Phone, Camera, Signal, Bluesky.
I like to keep my homescreen very clean of notifications and extraneous apps. I only keep my eight most-used apps on there. Of note: I use Feedly for keeping up with RSS feeds and news. RSS feeds are such a nicer way of consuming internet content than anything else! I keep Bluesky on the homescreen as it’s now my main social network, and of course, I keep Signal handy since that’s the main way I communicate every day.
I also asked Cooper to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:
- Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns — this is pure comfort food.
- I’ve been listening to this hardcore punk band made up of all trans folks called The HIRS Collective.
- I’m really excited about Meshtastic and LoRa meshes, so that’s been cool.
- I’ve been replaying Fallout: New Vegas.
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.
“Using Bleep. It’s like Google Keep got in a fight with MyMind and agreed to be friends.” – Esteban
“Firewalla. They are a router / firewall company that truly makes an appliance that can be plug-and-play, with a shell available for power users to do more things. They recently also released access points that are also super simple to set up. It’s more configuration than an Eero, but much better perf, too.” – Gurupanguji
“I am looking for a good app to track the games I am playing (or plan to) across various platforms. So far, GameTrack is my favorite, but Game Tracker seems like a good and cheaper entry. (Yes, they have basically the same name but are different apps, not confusing at all.)” – Daniele
“Using the T3 Chat client instead of the ChatGPT website or Anthropic’s crappy desktop app — turns out just making the webpage fast is an insane improvement to the experience.” – jtromero
“I’ve been using the ElevenReader app by ElevenLabs to create podcasts from some of those TL;DR articles. It boils them down into a shorter — obviously cruder — form so I can listen to a few while walking the dog. I can imagine a time when I can pipe all of my saved articles into there and tag those that sound interesting for more in-depth reading.” – Alan
“Trying Superlist again, love the thoughtful and beautiful design and the recent updates. Love that I can log on via web and quickly glance on my iPhone. Love the recent update.” – Samuel
“Moccamaster for coffee brewing. I’ve been switching back and forth from a pour-over to the Moccamaster the last while. I happened to be drinking a fresh pot when I read your post.” – Cody
“Finally got around to reading Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System. An amazing book to understand how Android came to be, and that made me dig out my old OS college notes. Now I’m reading too much about OSes of the ’90s / 2000s.” – Kruti
“There’s a group on Letterboxd that runs a monthly movie Scavenger Hunt, with a new host each month, that creates prompts for each day. Like: ‘watch a film from a country you want to visit.’ It really helps expand your movie horizon.” – Allyn
“I bought a Sonos Beam (second-gen), and it is such a huge upgrade over my TV’s speakers. I am kicking myself for not doing it years ago.” – Joshua
I probably use TikTok too much, but in addition to all the Office bloopers and stand-up clips it shows me, the thing I like most about it is the interface. TikTok, either accidentally or on purpose, discovered an essentially perfect browsing mechanism — the superfast, immediately loading, discovery-first vertical scroll. Obviously Instagram and YouTube and everybody else is trying to copy it. But what’s truly wild is that you can kind of TikTok-ify anything, and it works! WikiTok is just a TikTok feed of Wikipedia pages, and hoo boy is it fun to play with. ReddTok flips infinitely through Reddit posts and is way more engaging than the Reddit homepage.
My ongoing theory is that TikTok is going to be like Wordle, in that it will inspire not just a bunch of competitors (which already happened) but become essentially a new cultural paradigm. Wordle spawned a million different daily games, and TikTok is going to make everything — like, everything — into a vertical scroll. Because the formula always seems to work.