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Hello friends! Welcome in Installer #43, your guide to the best and Verge– the best thing in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so excited you found us, and you can also read all the back issues on Installer Homepage.)

This week I read about memeks and telepathy and John Lennon’s wristwatchi look He is presumed innocent and Wren Fair, testing Genspark for AI search stuff, I’m redoing my home screen with I’m dumbing down, and experimenting with overnight oats in an effort to make mornings less chaotic. (It turns out that peanut butter makes almost everything 20 percent better.)

Plus, I’ve got a new tech podcast for you, some handy new gadgets, a new calendar app, the game that’s going to take over your weekend, and more. Let’s get into it.

(As always, the best part of Installer are your ideas and advice. What are you currently doing? What great apps/books/podcasts/shows/games/recipes/whatever else have you discovered and loved recently? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy it Installertell them to subscribe here.)

• Asus VivoBook S 15. Copilot Plus computers are available. It’s been a strange rollout, with all the complications of Recall, but we’re starting to get a sense of just what this new era of Qualcomm-based Windows devices can do. I’m pretty optimistic so far, but I’m still waiting to see how the new surfaces play out.
• Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree. The overall vibe of this massive new DLC is basically “it’s Elden Ring, but somehow even more.” Considering how deep and big this game already was, and how many hours we’ve already put into it, that’s about all you can ask for.
• Angry cancer. If all of the Dropout Presents specials are as funny as this one from Hank Green, we’re in for a great run of new comedy. Green here is as funny and goofy as ever and extremely Hank Green-y. It’s a class you won’t regret.
• Xreal Beam Pro. Such a fun and different take on how smart glasses should work: instead of trying to bake everything into the glasses themselves, Xreal pulls all the smarts and software into a separate, fairly inexpensive smartphone-style device. Excited to test this one.
• Backfired: The Vaping Wars. The Juul story may forever go down as one of the strangest things to ever happen in Silicon Valley. This podcast delves deep into that story, along with the confusing public debate about vaping, the government’s struggle to keep up, and where things go from here.
• Arc for iPad. Still my favorite browser, finally available on almost all my devices. (When for Android, Arc people!?!) The app isn’t exactly optimized for the iPad — it’s missing some keyboard shortcuts and is basically just an enhanced version of the iPhone app — but it syncs and works well, and I’ll definitely be picking it up.
• Amie for Windows. Big week for cross-platform apps! Amie is one of my favorite calendar/to-do apps, and it’s gotten a lot more polished over the past few months. If you’re the productive all-in-one type and appreciate a delightful design, give this one a go.
• Logitech Keys-to-Go 2. I’ve carried the original Keys-To-Go in my bag for a few years now as a super light and convenient way to get things done with my phone or iPad. This feels like a huge upgrade: still light, still small, but with a more relevant set of keys. $80 is a lot, but I suspect I’ll end up buying one.
• A sense of rebellion. An amazingly well-produced and thoroughly reported podcast about some decade-old ideas about AI and how we can use and live with technology. The story here, about hippies and capitalists and government and big business, is sort of a technology story all packed into 10 episodes. I love this so far.
• Clipbud. A clipboard timeline is all well and good, but having a place with all the text you type a lot – your shipping address, responses to stock emails, important links, all of it – is life-changing. The built-in replace text and personal dictionary features (on iOS and Android respectively) do a lot of this and apps like Torn off are mega-powerful, but this new one is quite nice to use.

I think Nick Quah introduced me to more great podcasts than any other person on earth. Whether in the early days of Hot Pod or in his 1.5x speed newsletter at address Vulture (On the edgeVox Media’s sister site), he seems to have been listening to all the shows all the time. In fact, just this week he wrote a funny story about how chat podcasts have taken over and named some of the biggest names in New Radio.

I asked Nick to share his home screen because a) I was curious what podcast app he was using and b) I was hoping he might recommend a new show or two. I got my wish in both cases! Here’s Nick’s home screen plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: Recently upgraded from my trusty iPhone 12 to the iPhone 15. Seems to be doing well so far; I’m no longer stressed about running out of juice on long flights.

The wallpaper: My sweet, sweet baby boy Siobhan (aka Shooby).

Applications: Calendar, Photos, Clock, Weather, Google Maps, Tasks, Google Calendar, Gmail, Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, Steam, Delta, Strava, Discord, Slack, Stocks, LastPass, Messages, Phone, Firefox, Pocket Casts.

Yeah, well, as you can see, I’m pretty vanilla for the most part. All of the instant apps are things that I visit with some frequency every day. Google Maps for navigation (and eavesdropping). To do to sort out my brain. TikTok and Instagram for something to do in the bathroom. I’ve been playing a lot more these days, so I’m constantly scouring Steam for deals. It’s cool because somehow I became a big runner. I’ve also been dabbling in Delta quite a bit, working on a backlog of old JRPGs. And of course, Pocket Casts, which is my go-to for listening to podcasts.

I also asked Nick to share a few things that are on his mind right now. Here’s what he sent back:

• I’m a big review/replay person and for whatever reason summer is usually when I take my annual revisits. I’m making my way right now Stop and start for the sixth time. God, this show is so wonderful. It’s the 10th anniversary, you know?
• Like the rest of the universe at this point, it seems, I’m digging Chappell Roan. “Red Wine Supernova”, very good.
• I’m slowly making my way Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Horror and Redemption in the City of LoveDavid Talbot’s San Francisco story from 2013. I find it quite remarkable.
• Catch up episodes of My perfect consoleSimon Parkin’s great interview “Desert Island Discs But For Video Games” shows that it really doubles as a fun historical record of the medium.

here’s what Installer community is in this week. I also want to know what you’re up to right now! Email installer@theverge.com or send me a message on Signal — @davidpierce.11 ​​— with your recommendations for anything and we’ll feature some of our favorites each week. For even more recommendations than fit here, see the answers to this post in threads.

“This little camera. I was thinking of ways in my head to justify it because it’s so cute, but also the pictures are surprisingly decent.” – Dalton

“Take a look The same. This is a Nostr server that exposes the Mastodon API to its clients. So the promise is that you will be able to take your very nice Mastodon (Ivory, Ice Cubes) app and add a Nostr link right into it. It would be like an additional server in the same app where your main Mastodon account is.” – Adnan

“I slowly started following Pokemón trading cards and was addicted to watching TheBulbaStore on YouTube. Super interesting to see the vendor perspective and the prices some cards are going for now!” – Peter

“The Hawthorne and Horowitz Mysteries by Anthony Horowitz. He recently released the fifth in the series, Near Death. They all have tortured puns as titles (in this case ‘near’ is a British word for an enclosed space). On top of that, the books are metafiction in which Horowitz himself is the protagonist, talking about how he writes the series of murder mysteries you’re reading. Still, they’re some of the best contemporary murder mysteries I’ve read, and they do a great job of paying homage to Agatha Christie while playing with the genre.” – Kendrick

“I play and watch chess! Chess is cool now! Lots of great ways to play, but Chess.com is probably the best for beginners. And there is great YouTube content on chess from Eric Rosen, Irina Krush, Levi Rosemanand Hikaru Nakamura. I’m getting good so I can teach my three-year-old niece to be a handyman someday.” – Ryan

“I’m really enjoying it”Jet Lag: The Game” on YouTube. imagine The Amazing Race, but actually good and not scripted. The hosts are likable and the game has a pretty decent complexity behind it. They are about to finish their season in Australia and it was great.” – Dev

“I’m reading right now Hell Divers II: Ghosts by Nicholas Sansbury Smith. Post-apocalyptic sci-fi about halo jumpers diving into radioactive wastelands to scavenge stockpiles of mutant monsters, and yes, it’s as good as it sounds.” – Jesse

“I was obsessed with my new one Klydoclock, a digital take on the classic analog watch. It features changing, artist-curated faces and can even tick and chime the hour if you like. Best of all: it has no other features and is not tied to an app or your phone. Minimalism and elegance at its best.” – Jonathan

“I truly believe that a home server or NAS is useful and readily available to more people than currently have one. More people should have their own Plex server, Pi-hole, self-hosted cloud storage, Minecraft serveror self-hosted VPN. An old computer is all you need if you want to keep it simple. And if you don’t mind learning how to work with Linux, you can even use an old Android phone or a cheap Raspberry Pi clone. – Voltaire

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I absolutely can’t get enough of watching/listening/reading about how people who are great at their stuff do their stuff. (Musician Kygo has a streak of making videos it’s always the first example I think of in this genre.) One of my recent favorites is this video, with Zane Lowe interviewing Phineas and Billie Eilish about the making of Eilish’s latest album. They talk about process, fear, microphones, editing and much more. I’ll almost certainly never make an album, or make a movie, or make it to the NBA, but hearing people talk about how they do it never gets old.