Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 151, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, get psyched because it’s officially Bad Holiday Movie Season, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about Andrew Garfield and GTA VI and sexy joke thieves, finally actually watching The Sopranosfor the first time (I know, I know), mourning the end of Salon, reinstalling the new and extremely improved Notion Calendar, testing the new Keurig Alta coffee machine, reviewing the iPad Mini and the touchscreen MacBook Pro, and really thinking about just throwing it all away and buying an Enough Phone.
I also have for you the long-awaited return of a classic Zelda game, a monster movie worth the trek to the theater, a couple of great new phone accessories, awesome retro headphones, and more. Let’s do it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / playing / listening to / hacking onto an E Ink display this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I have a confession to make: I’ve never played this game all the way through. Not sure how! Just missed it. But seeing my friends and coworkers fall back in love with Hyrule has convinced me to get all the way into the remake. I genuinely can’t wait.
- Godzilla Minus Zero. Three years ago, Godzilla Minus One was a big hit and a surprisingly great movie. The sequel came with much higher expectations, but everyone seems to agree it’s a deserving follow-up. I’m not generally one for monster movies, but this series really does it for me.
- Affinity for iPad. Canva’s app now unifies all its tools in one place, just like on the Mac. Affinity makes perfect sense on the iPad, and comes with lots of Apple Pencil integration and clever touch-friendly tools. I’m no designer, but I am excited to play with this as a photo editing tool.
- The Moft Dynamic Folio Case. Here’s one for all you iPhone Duo buyers. Moft’s cases are a little complicated to figure out, but really cleverly designed to make your phone even more useful. I’m guessing this is going to be a lot better than Apple’s weird case / kickstand thing.
- The Peak Design Kickstand Travel Battery. While we’re on the subject of kickstands, here’s the one I’m buying this week. Peak Design makes good stuff, and I frequently find that I need extra juice at exactly the moment I want to watch something on a plane or train. This one’s going right into my backpack and probably never coming out.
- The Bambu Lab H3C. I am dangerously close to becoming a 3D Printer Dude. At $2,500, this one’s a little steep for my wallet, but I think my colleague Sean Hollister is right that this is what the future of 3D printing looks like. Simpler, more foolproof, easy enough even for a goofus like me to make some pretty cool stuff.
- “Ranking the world’s most popular pens for journaling.” I know we all love a good pen — and Peter McKinnon does an excellent job of breaking down a few dozen supposedly good pens to see which ones really hold up. I bought more than one pen after watching this.
- Instagram Edits for Mac. Oh, great, just as I was finally getting good at CapCut! I like the Edits mobile app a lot, and the desktop app seems to be even a little more powerful. Plus: free. This is how I finally take down Cristiano Ronaldo.
- The Sony MDR-3R headphones. Respect to Sony for taking the retro headphone trend all the way to its logical conclusion and just releasing the headphones from the original Walkman. You’ll look a little like Nathan Fielder in You Can See Everything when you wear them, and $60 ain’t cheap, but there’s something so incredibly ’70s-era cool about them.
- The Motorola Signature 27. This is just a pure tour de force of a smartphone spec sheet. Monster camera; brightest screen; giant battery. Also very cool to see a flagship phone with support for GrapheneOS, for the less Google-inclined among us. It’s expensive, and only shipping… someday… but I just like that phones like this exist.
We talked last week about Readwise Books, the new app that’s a mix of Kindle, Goodreads, and Strava. I’m a longtime fan and user of Readwise Reader, so I wasn’t shocked that I liked the new app a lot, too. And I’ve heard from a bunch of you that you do, too!
I’ve talked to Tristan Homsi, one of the Readwise cofounders, a few times over the years, and have always enjoyed hearing his thoughts about reading, apps, and digital products in general. I asked him to share his homescreen to see if I might be able to get a hint about what he’s reading and the other stuff he thinks is good. (I also asked Daniel Doyon, Readwise’s other cofounder, to share, and he didn’t respond. Daniel is dead to me.)
Here’s Tristan’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 13 (!).Believe it or not, I chose to buy this relatively outdated phone last year… not because it’s my favorite form factor or anything, but because it’s closer in specs to the median device our Readwise users have and helps me build a bit more user empathy with them. I’m able to catch performance regressions and bugs in Readwise that the developers on our team with Duos and Pro Maxes and such miss.
Let me tell you though, iOS 26 itself does not work amazingly on an iPhone 13. Lots of lagging and janky animations. I am somewhat bought into the conspiracy theory that they make the old phones suck so you buy a new one… not so much intentionally, but rather by virtue of just making each successive iOS use more and more resources, doing fancier and fancier things.
The wallpaper: My lovely wife and my cat Sophie 🙂
The apps: Clock, Settings, Google Calendar, Camera, Google Maps, Spotify, Bay Wheels, Oura, Eight Sleep, Auto Eight, BeReal, ChatGPT, Runmeter, Strava, Readwise Highlights, Readwise Reader, Phone, Messages, Safari.
Of course, I have all three Readwise apps front and center. Highlights and Reader as app icons, and Readwise Books in widget form at the top! It’s a great reminder to jump back into your current book (I’m reading Apple in China right now… speaking of Apple!) instead of scrolling twitter (on a later page), and seeing my friends currently reading really makes me want to jump in and join them 🙂
I also am a huge fan of the somewhat-defunct social app BeReal. It had its moment in 2022, but quite a few of my friends are still on there! You post once a day, can see what your close friends around the world are doing, and most importantly can’t get sucked in for more than two minutes since it limits you to a random photo or two a day! I still post basically every day, and have almost five years of memories in there.
Speaking of getting sucked in, I don’t have it pictured on my home screen, but I also have Clearspace installed, which helps me stay off of all social media.
Some other apps shown on the homescreen: “auto eight” is something I vibecoded to better control my Eight Sleep mattress (lol)… Strava and Runmeter are awesome for tracking my runs… and Bay Wheels is my main mode of commute around San Francisco daily.
I also asked Tristan to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:
- I follow some amazing niche internet blogs, which you should check out if you haven’t. I love the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, famous for their citizen science and potato-maxxing. I also love Gwern.net, Deepfates, and Dynomight… among many others!
- And of course I’m always reading books. The most recent fiction series I loved was the Red Knight series — which I can only recommend if you are into dense, dark, fantasy — but man, if you are, the author is a genius.
- For non-fiction, it’s hard for me to plug anything but my favorite book of all time, The Beginning of Infinity. It’s not the easiest to get through, but if you do it will likely change the way you see the world, as it did for me!
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, check out the replies to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.
“Finally started reading Dungeon Crawler Carl (recommend); finding the Duo to be a perfect foldable reading device. Going to have to take a break to save Princess Zelda though.” — Will
“I’m playing around with CutWire’s Drift video editor (alt to CapCut) and I’m honestly shocked at how high-quality it feels.” — Kolin
“A wonderful Belgian developer put together an alternative Kobo EPUB reader called Kobalt that I’ve been really enjoying. It’s got a very clean and well-designed UI with a bunch of really nice features that make it a much more enjoyable experience to use. There’s even an Android app, so I also put it on my Supernote Manta to use with larger format content. So much nicer than KOReader!” — Dylan
“As a mourning Arc user, I’ve been on the search for my next browser, especially one with a good mobile experience and this one is AWESOME. Lens Browser feels like what Arc Search on mobile would have become had they stuck with it. Currently only mobile for now, but it does have a Mac toolbar companion for sharing links.” — Garrett
“Since Arc Search is going away, I’ve been using Lens, and it’s exactly what I’ve been wanting in a mobile browser. It’s the perfect Arc Search replacement.” — Corey
“My Boox Picco literally just arrived today. So now I’m trying to churn through Fellowship of the Ring on it, plus my economics textbook.” — Lukas
“I’m trying to get back to the gym, and my motivation is I can only watch a show I want to watch if I’m on the treadmill. I’m finally starting Barry. Turns out, good show!” — Ben
“Well, Zelda…, but also World of Warcraft Forever, but also 007 First Light (which is letting everyone play the opening for free).” — djstarburst
“Playing the Final Fantasy Resonance demo on Switch 2 while waiting for Ocarina of Time to show up at my door and having a blast. It’s not spectacular, but hits the right amount of nostalgia and gameplay for me.” — Micheal
“Been catching up on Avatar: Seven Havens, and oh my goodness, the art style, the characters, the music, the worldbuilding!!!??? It’s all so fresh and delightful and human!” — Olof
I’ve mentioned Kagi a bunch of times in this newsletter — it has been my default search engine for the last few years, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. (What if Google, but good, you know?) The challenge with Kagi is it costs $10 a month, which is a lot to ask when Google is free. But as of this week, you can now at least try it for yourself, since Kagi will give you 50 free searches before even asking you to sign up. You get 100 more when you do, even before you pay.
If you search a lot, and miss what Google used to be, give Kagi a whirl. I am a very happy customer, and suspect I will be for a long time.
