The much simpler way to keep track of everything

The much simpler way to keep track of everything

2024-10-07 04:20:29

In this week’s Installer: smart rings, post-bot AIs, and Android browsers

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 55, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, get ready to ruin your phone’s storage, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

This week, I’ve been reading about AI girlfriends and Bobbi Althoff and baseball pitchers, watching Nobody Wants This (my favorite new show in forever) and the new noodle-focused Chef’s Table (a long-standing fave), falling in love with Coldplay all over again, listening to John Oliver talk journalism, playing a lot of Alphaguess, and painstakingly moving all my junk to my new blue iPhone 16. It’s so pretty.

I also have for you a handy new way to track your stuff, a great app for posting to social media, a smart new way to manage your life on Apple devices, a new anime worth watching on Netflix, a new version of the best smart ring, and much more. Let’s dig in.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be playing/reading / watching / eating / 3D printing / building from Legos this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)

Installer

/ A weekly newsletter by David Pierce designed to tell you everything you need to download, watch, read, listen to, and explore that fits in The Verge’s universe.

The Drop

  • The Pebblebee Clip Universal. This tracker works with both Apple’s Find My and Google’s Find My Device systems, which is just such an obviously good and correct idea! For a multiplatform person or family, this is a way better buy than a bunch of AirTags.
  • Croissant. We may not live in the full everything-everywhere, fediverse-y social world I want, but at least cross-posting is getting easier. This is a really nice-looking iOS app that lets you post simultaneously to Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon. It’s also just really nice to type in.
  • The Raspberry Pi AI Camera. This is going to be a tinkerer’s paradise: a $70 camera with a built-in AI processor that you can use for machine vision, automated photo-taking, and lots more. I can’t wait to see what people build with this.
  • Arc Search for Android. Arc’s still my go-to browser, and it’s getting easier to commit to that as the company comes to more platforms. This one is still very much in beta, but I have it on my Pixel Fold and it’s working pretty well so far.
  • “How I Replaced Notion with Reminders, Numbers, and Notes.” So, so, so many of you sent this to me this week! Joan Westenberg’s deep dive into Apple’s productivity tools is really smart and detailed and is probably the way most people should manage their lives.
  • Microsoft Copilot. Sure, I’m a sucker for a warm-shaded website and some calming illustrations, but I really like the new look of Microsoft’s AI bot. And I like that Microsoft is looking at Copilot less like a work tool and more like a handy personal helper.
  • The Oura Ring 4. I like the Oura Ring a lot, but it’s always been just a bit too chunky to feel truly comfortable on my finger. This one has some neat-sounding new features and improvements, but mostly, it seems to be significantly smaller. (And has lost the little flat-tire edge, which is a victory in its own right.)
  • Dan Da Dan. A new anime that is by just about all accounts both a really fun story about ghosts and aliens and high school and a remarkable achievement in animation. Fans have been waiting for a new title this good for a while, and it sounds like everything we could have hoped for.
  • ChatGPT Canvas. We are, slowly but surely, getting out of the chatbot era of AI models. This looks a lot like Claude’s Artifacts feature in that it lets you make something from scratch and then edit it in place with the model’s help. It’s fun! And useful!
  • The Franchise. The premise of this show — a fictionalized behind-the-scenes look at the cast and crew making a big-budget superhero movie — reminds me a bit of the show Unreal. And I LOVE Unreal. The reviews here aren’t all great, but I’ll be watching anyway.

Screen share

I love when I ask someone to share their homescreen with us and realize I have absolutely no idea what it might look like. Kyle Wiens, the CEO of iFixit, was one of those people: he’s a tinkerer and a builder and an obvious tech fiend, so I thought he might have a million apps and widgets and everything customized just so. But he’s also a big believer in right to repair and keeping your gadgets working forever, so maybe he’d have, like, a BlackBerry from 2004 that was still somehow up and running? 

Turns out, it was somewhere in the middle. Here’s Kyle’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: I have a Pixel 6A, which eked through iFixit’s internal purchasing approval with a 5/10 on our repairability scorecard. Unlike the 5A, it doesn’t have a headphone jack, which is a daily frustration. I use my headphones so much! I’ve almost worn out the USB-C port from using it all day, every day, with a headphone adapter. A couple pins are worn out so USB cables only charge when inserted one direction right now. I need to open it up to fix it! Unfortunately, the USB port is soldered to the main board, making this either a main board swap or a microsoldering repair. The problem with swapping the main board, aside from the expense, is that you lose your data.

Repairability matters. Phones should last at least 10 years, but this phone is going to struggle to last five. Google has come a long way but still has a ways to go. Modularity is longevity.

And eSIMs work great now! This phone has a SIM card slot, which would serve me much better as a microSD expansion bay.

The wallpaper: First of all, dark mode for lyfe. I spend so much time looking at screens, the least they can do is not blast me with every pixel set to maximum white light output! 

The wallpaper is the Pixel’s Nature Swept, in orange. This seems like a pretty good simulacrum of what my future viewport on Mars will look like. Come on Elon, go faster! The next transfer window is only two years out.

The apps: Audible, Pocket Casts, Google Maps, Google Photos, Slack, Settings, Phone, Messages, Gmail, Opera, Google Calendar.

I’m addicted to audiobooks. I read 2–4 a week, on about 1.5x (faster for some readers, slower for others). Audible’s app keeps getting buggier over time. It really feels like they’re trying to drive their customers away. Using the app in a poor network area is quite frustrating — even when you’ve already got books downloaded, Amazon’s DRM likes to phone home way too often. OpenAudible is quite good, and I’m pretty tempted to jump ship to a DRM-free alternative like Downpour.

The Google Podcasts app was great, and I’m sad they killed it — but that’s what I get for relying on Google for something useful. Pocket Casts is a fantastic replacement. Relatedly, RIP Google Reader and Feedburner. With how good the text-to-voice tools are getting now, how great would that tool have been to autocreate a podcast from your RSS feed?

One of our right to repair coalition members just made this synthetic podcast from Aaron Perzanowski’s seminal book on the topic. It’s amazing! The “podcast” is very close to the source material, and I didn’t notice any particular mistakes. 

I also asked Kyle to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:

I generally hate apps. But sometimes you need one, so let’s talk apps!

  • I spend a lot of time in low-reception environments. I understand why carrier execs who live in cities think 5G is a good idea, but a very large portion of the US still has zero cell phone coverage. I spend a lot of time calling via Starlink Wi-Fi rather than cell towers because I don’t have reception on any carrier at my house or the off-grid farm that I’m building.
  • MTB Project has all the best trails, and a native app really is the best way to manage your location in an off-grid environment.  
  • And onX! It’s expensive, but I use it so much that it’s worth it. It works flawlessly without cell data, and while all its mapping sources are public, they merge the datasets in a super useful way. The hunting app, of all things, has property ownership data, which is amazing for real estate research. We used it to research the area around the Onion Bottom neighborhood in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the site of our new distribution center. It beats the pants off all the real estate-specific software like LandGlide. And hunters are super privacy-conscious, so I’m not worried about my tracks getting shared with the world like Strava does. My biggest beef is that they have three separate apps for offroading, hunting, and hiking. They don’t have a way to have all three kinds of trails in one place, which would be fantastic. Come on, guys!
  • iFixit is working on our own app. Our new FixHub soldering iron, which Sean Hollister reviewed the other day, communicates via serial interface so it’s easier for hobbyists to tinker with it. WebSerial is a web standard, but unfortunately, it’s not supported on any mobile browsers yet. Our native app will bridge the gap until the mobile Safari and Chrome teams add WebSerial support.

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. If you want even more great recommendations than I could fit here, check out the replies to this post on Threads.

“Zing Coach. I’ve spent years looking for workout apps because I’m not good at just committing to exercising without a full plan before I start. Zing takes into account your age, gender, and even injuries to write the best workout schedule for you — using AI (huh!). It costs a bit, but seriously, for those who are constantly switching between workout apps, this is the one for you.” – Calvin

“I’m loving my SiliconDust HDHomeRun Flex 4K. Combined with Plex Pass, it is easily the most intuitive and feature-rich OTT viewing experience.” – Joseph

“Imagining Arc by The Browser Company is a newish (and ongoing) podcast with CEO Josh Miller about the company’s work on the 2.0 version of the Arc web browser. The show is extremely honest about the difficulties the team has faced and the ideas they’re struggling with, and it’s extremely Verge-y in the way it dives into how browsers and technology make us feel. Anyone who’s interested in tech and design — or is just curious about where Arc is headed — should definitely give it a try.” – Kaiden

“In my never-ending quest to find a good task manager, I came across this dead-simple to-do app called Daily. It’s been perfect for my daily standups and is the perfect place to dump a ton of tasks you need to get done for the day.” – Eddy

“​​I recently stumbled upon a title called Outlanders 2, an updated and enhanced version of the original Outlanders, and it’s wonderful. You take care of a few outlanders, with the objective to survive, build houses, grow the population, hunt for food, and prosper. The visuals are amazing, the mechanics are easy to learn, and the animations and details are just perfect. Combined with the soundtrack, it’s a really cozy experience that will catch you and probably never let go.” – Vojta

“I am reading It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood. She recently lost her brother. New profits for the amazing graphic novel from the day her brother left till the end of the year are being donated to mental health charities.” – Daniel

“I’m by no means an audiophile, but the Qudelix-5K has given new life to my studio headphones. Super-quick Bluetooth pairing, and I have mine clipped directly on the headphones, so no dangling cords!” – Jack

“I’m a very organized person, especially when it comes to traveling. Tripsy for iOS is hands-down the best travel planner app I’ve ever tried. It’s really well designed and easy to use. They even give you flight alerts similar to Flighty, so I’ve stopped paying for Flighty altogether. I’ve tried Tripit before, but that app feels like a dinosaur compared to Tripsy.” – Daniel

“If you’re a fan of newsletters, hoarding bookmarks, and collecting endless internet wisdom, you should try out Pincone. I work in marketing, so my email gets really cluttered with newsletters — I’ve now added all of them to Pincone, and it has freed my inbox loads! It also doubles as a bookmarking tool, and I like how I can save everything into files and add tags, it makes it so much easier to find stuff later.” – Lea

“I’m relistening to a series of audiobooks: the Bobiverse. It’s super nerdy and really good fun!” – Wenzel

Signing off

The “What’s on your desk” series is one of my favorite things we do here at The Verge, and I had the pleasure of sharing my own desk this week. If you’ve ever wondered about my setup, the gear I use, or where I’m sitting writing this very newsletter right now, this should have everything you need to know.

And if I could leave you with two thoughts, it’s these: you can never have too many charging cables; and actually, being a mess is just fine.

See you next week!