Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 80, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you had better luck than I did preordering a Switch 2, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about The Telepathy Tapes and extremely online parenting and translation glasses, watching The Men Who Built America, cackling at this incredible star-studded live reading of the original Star Wars, playing the whole archive of 4×3, doing some writing in the new Easlo Journal app, testing some headphones I impulse-bought on the TikTok Shop, and seeing if the Kagi Assistant fits into my search-engine world.
Oh, also: Thanks to everyone who sent me notes with thoughts about wallpapers! You’ve given me a bunch of fun ideas about how to expand the Screen Share section, including showing off more of your setups. More on that to come really soon.
I also have for you a terrific new entry in the Star Wars universe, a flip phone worth a look, new apps from Instagram and Perplexity, two games you’ll love, and much more. Pricey week, this one… sorry in advance. Let’s dig in.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you playing / reading / watching / scrolling / buying / building this week? What should everyone else be into, too? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)
The Drop
- Andor season 2. The best Star Wars thing going right now, and it’s not especially close. I wondered if season two could continue the unusual, almost off-brand take on this universe, but by all accounts the show completely stuck the landing.
- The Motorola Razr Ultra. Motorola is, like, this close to getting the 2025 flip phone exactly right. The new model seems to be a little sturdier, a little faster, and a little less of a compromise just to get the flip. That’s the goal! I just wish it didn’t cost $1,299, and I wish I knew when it was shipping.
- “Parker’s Obsessed with this Movie (But She Cannot Find it Anywhere).” A delightful, and extremely relatable, podcast low-stakes mystery: this movie has an IMDb page, but doesn’t seem to exist anywhere at all. A fun dive into where things go when they go away.
- Instagram Edits. I mean, you get it, it’s CapCut but for Instagram. But this is a good idea! It’s weird, frankly, that there aren’t more top-notch apps for editing social video. There’s some interesting AI at work in this one, too. Say this for Meta: it copies well.
- Perplexity iOS Voice Assistant. One of the more ambitious mobile assistants I’ve seen. Perplexity actually connected its assistant to Reminders, Calendar, and other system features — which I don’t think I knew was possible — and seems to just blow Siri out of the water.
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Very few games are able to simultaneously feel like a movie and a video game. Clair Obscur does, in part because it’s voiced by a bunch of movie stars! The premise here is great, the story is huge, and frankly I’ll watch Andy Serkis in anything.
- The WaterField Designs Tech Folio Tank Backpack. I have always been a sucker for a great bag. I’ve curbed my habit a little now that I work from home, but this one? This $419 backpack fits even humongous laptops, has pockets for everything you could imagine, and is only slightly enormous. I want one.
- The Insta360 X5. I’m convinced that if Insta360 had a better company name, it would be as recognizable as GoPro. Its products are great! This one’s expensive — $550 — but it’s every bit a flagship action camera, and the replaceable lenses are really clever.
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. There is nothing cooler than just dropping a game out of nowhere on an unsuspecting public that is obviously going to love it. That’s what Bethesda did with this giant update to a 20-year-old game — we’ve had inklings for a while that this was coming eventually, but lots of fans were still pleasantly surprised this week.
I first got to know Jeff Sheldon, the proprietor of Ugmonk, a couple of years ago when I wrote a story about his Gather collection of desk gear. But I first became a fan of his work when I discovered his Analog productivity system, a cleverly designed way to get things done with pen and paper. (I know a lot of you like Analog stuff, too, so PSA: there’s a new “Steel” version of the system that is extremely nice-looking.)
Jeff is one of those people who likes everything to be just so, which I very much appreciate about him. I asked him to share his homescreen with us, wondering if it would be the same thing. I was not disappointed. Here’s Jeff’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 16 Pro.
The wallpaper: Solid black. I never understood how people can see their apps with a busy photo behind them. 🤷♂️My lockscreen is a photo I took in Copenhagen.
The apps: Photos, Fantastical, Ugmonk, Google Maps, Weather, Apple Podcasts, MyMind, Dropbox Paper, X, Instagram, Threads, Apple Notes, Camera, Spotify, Phone, Shopify, Mail, Messages, Slack, Safari.
I use the Due app widget to capture to-do’s when I’m on the go and then I transfer these onto an Analog Card once I’m at my desk so they actually get done. Fantastical’s natural language input is so much nicer than iCal’s. “Call with David Pierce tomorrow 10AM.”
I save everything to MyMind. It’s like a private Pinterest board that’s way easier to search and doesn’t have ads. I‘ve been using Dropbox Paper for many years, and use it for everything. It’s basically a much cleaner version of Google Docs with built-in markdown and smart links. Unfortunately the iPhone app is pretty janky, so I mostly use it for viewing docs and do actual input on desktop. Apple Notes is for anything and everything.
I also asked Jeff to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:
- The Orchid from Telepathic Instruments. I don’t even play music, but I want this thing. The video is so good.
- This case study of the Herman Miller rebrand. So much design gold in here.
- SABLE, fABLE, Bon Iver’s newest album. I’ve had this on repeat for days. One of my favorite artists. Also, here’s a great interview with Justin Vernon.
- Limba Trip. This guy’s spin art is so trippy.
Crowdsourced
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 more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.
“I have loved, and struggled with my Apple MagSafe wallet for a long time. I’m always afraid it’s going to fall off. So a while ago I found this case that basically solves all the MagSafe issues. It’s called OpenCase, and they basically cut a hole in the case the exact size of an Apple wallet, which creates a lip that the wallet would run into if it tried to slide off. Now it can’t fall off unless I remove it intentionally.” — Mike
“Found an awesome game off of a Hacker News comment: A Short Hike. Beautiful little short experience.” — Fil
“In keeping with my desire to ‘buck the algorithms’ in a day and age where there are too many simultaneous algorithms telling you what to do, I’ve been referred to a free newsletter that just recommends one movie, every Tuesday. It’s called Tuesday Night Movie Night.” — Phillip
“Trying to clear out my Blank Check podcast backlog so I’ve seen about eight thousand Steven Spielberg movies in the last few days. This guy might be going places.” — Luis
“A fun driving game: It’s called Slow Roads, and it’s a zen driving experience. It’s relaxing and you can change the environment, it has no traffic. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who likes driving.” — Srirudran
“I’ve been testing this weather app for iOS called Lume that uses GPT. Loving the UI so far! Just wish it had a widget.” — Daniel
“Aerospace is a full window-tiling system for MacOS that makes keyboard navigation of a ton of windows super easy, once you learn the mental model of tiled window management.” — James
“I just got around to reading this essay in Hearing Things. Made me think about so many things, but especially how music has shaped so much of my worldview, and the strong memories I have of listening to and playing music with friends and family. Nothing better.” — Rhoades
“I’ve been enjoying Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney for the past few weeks, but last night’s episode was surely one of the best. There’s a few more weeks. It’s a fun take on the traditional talk show format, which is much needed in the US, and it’s live with no delay.” — Bob
Signing off
The traveling salesman problem is one of those things that smart people in tech just kind of throw around all the time, as sort of a shorthand for problems that seem straightforward but turn out to be massively difficult even for powerful computers. The simplest version of the TSP is just this: if I give you a list of cities, and the distances between each of them, what’s the shortest possible route that gets to them all once and then back to where you started? There are actually lots of solutions to lots of versions of this problem, but it’s still part of how algorithms are thought of and tested.
Anyway, I spent a lot of time this week reading about Korea81998, a project that managed to solve the traveling salesman problem for all 81,998 bars in South Korea. The project’s website starts with a simple explanation of the problem and then goes deep into the math and computation required to make it work. This particular bar crawl would take you just a smidge under six months to complete, and trust me: there’s no way to do it even one second faster.
Oh, and if you want to go even deeper on this, someone on Hacker News linked to this great hourlong talk from one of the researchers all about solving TSPs. It’s not light weekend viewing, but it’s awesome.
See you next week!
