Hello friends! you are welcome installer Number 65, your guide to the best and the verge-The best stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, get ready to take up all your phone's storage space, and you can also read all the old versions here installer home page,
this is the last installer Year old! I'm taking a few weeks off for the holidays, and I hope you get some time off too. Thank you so much to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter, emailed me their recommendations, told me I'm crazy about to-do lists, and generally been a part of the Installerverse this year. Creating this newsletter has been so much fun, and I'm so excited to create it with you. Bigger and better next year!
This week, I'm reading about Spotify's Ghost Artists And formula 1 And Mufasa And extremely stupid new york jets, Watching hot cold (You can judge me, that's okay) And watching again 30 rock, spanking Balatro For the first time, and trying to explain to my child that waking up at 4 am every day is actually not fun and cool.
I've got a cool new smart home controller for you, a new app for the future of social networks, the next Sonic movie, and much more. Plus, our most requested homescreen… ever? let's do this.
(As always, the best part of installer Have your thoughts and suggestions. What are you doing right now? What should everyone else be playing/reading/watching/building/upgrading this holiday season? tell me everything: installer@theverge.comAnd if you know anyone else who might enjoy installertell them Subscribe here,
drop
- home assistant voice, I am currently actively avoiding becoming a home helper, because as soon as I find out Green I'm going to be a total smart home fanatic in my house. But this new voice assistant and microphone – you can call it JARVIS! -I'm more tempted than ever. I might spend the holidays tearing down my house.
- flipboard surfI'I've been ranting and raving for two years about what the future of the Fediverse looks like, and Surf – a way to create and consume all kinds of feeds from Mastodon and Bluesky to RSS and YouTube – it's here so far. That's the best evidence of that that I've seen. The app only has a waitlist and it's opening slowly, but you should get on the list. The surf is amazing.
- google whisk, Prompt engineering was never a good idea. Google is one of those companies trying to find better ways – in this case, it made a way Inspire your models by simply uploading some inspection images and then describing what you want. I don't know if it's useful or not, but it's fun to play with.
- sonic the hedgehog 3, I feel like no one ever talks about the Sonic movies? But I really enjoyed the first two, and the reviews on the latest installment have been really strong. And apparently Jim Carrey is on a whole new level with this.
- acorn 8, Acorns is one of my favorite Mac apps. It's like Photoshop for babies, in the sense that it can't do everything but it also doesn't require a master's degree to use it. The new version brings a bunch of automatic editing and selection features, shortcut integration, and some other useful new stuff.
- niagara launcher, Niagara remains my favorite Android launcher, and I really like the new Usage Breaker feature that helps you track and manage your screen time. It's much subtler and more thoughtful than all the OS-level work Google and Apple are doing.
- 1-800-CHATGPT, A Phone hotline for chatting with AI is definitely on at least Half a gimmick, but I like it? (You can also message the number on WhatsApp.) Phone-number tech products like GOOG-411 and 777-FILM have a long and happy history, and I'm glad it's not over.
- LG Signature OLED T, for our last installer of the year, so far the most expensive thing we've discussed: a 77-inch, somewhat transparent, fishbowl tv It's both extremely cool and completely pointless, and is now on sale for $59,999. If you buy one of these, email me. I need to know Everything.
screen share
When I was first planning the installer I wrote a document in which I wrote down a group of people who seemed like the perfect people to include in the homescreen-sharing section. hank green The name was the first in that list. hank is one youtuber and a TikToker and one Teacher and a standup comic and a businessman slash philanthropist and one Author And just like that, seems to be everyone's favorite person on the internet? I can think of a few people like this installer As in Hank.
And for this, in the final issue of the year, Hank agreed to share his homescreen! (He also assigned me a story in the middle of our email exchange, which I'll allow, because it seemed like a pretty good story idea.) I was hoping he'd have 12 phones, each for a different social platform, but alas. It appears there is only one.
Here's Hank's homescreen, along with some information about the apps he uses and why:
Wallpaper: My son is attacking me with the cat's tail and Mars.
Apps: Shopify, Wikipedia, YouTube, Duolingo, Apple Notes, Google Authenticator, Google, Philips Hue, FocusFriend, Gmail, Phone, Messages, Google Calendar.
I know it's messed up. It's all evolved over the years and now I just know where everything is and can never change anything. If there's any hot take on this home screen, it's that more people should use Wikipedia as a primary search engine – this is often where you're going to end up anyway, so I'd keep it handy. Am. Also, I recently moved Twitter out of my social networking folder so that makes it harder for me to use it. It's like three swipes away now, although still on my phone. I run several Shopify stores which are a big part of my business, that's why they're there!
By far the most used non-social media app on my phone is Notes. I rely on it in a very unhealthy way which makes it an extremely entertaining scroll, at least for me. My short-term memory isn't what it used to be, so everything ends there. there is also a secret project over here Which I could have removed but instead we're having a soft-launch… you can probably spot it if you look closely enough.
I also asked Hank to share some of the things he's currently involved in. Here's what he sent back:
- adrien tchaikovskyIf you haven't read any, read children of timeBut if you only read children of time In the series you are missing out on a lot of interesting ideas about what the mind is and the strange and exciting future we are moving towards.
- blue skyThis is where the stupid people are, and so, five years from now, this is where everyone will be.
- Narwhal Wikipedia page analyzed powerfully and entertainingly by This youtube channel HG ModernismAnd I loved it and you're an idiot if you don't watch it.
- Mindscape of Shawn Carroll:If sometimes you think, “I like that Hank Green but he's not technical enough and doesn't take on deep topics like the origin of life or consciousness,” boy, do I have a podcast for you!!
- borderline: PBS investigative documentary show. It's extremely good and I think it's underappreciated. Like, long YouTube videos analyzing things are great, but do you know what's even better? When a large team of professionals work together on a long video analyzing things. The fact that I have more subscribers than borderline There is a mess on YouTube.
crowdsourced
what's here installer Community is in this week. I also want to know what you are doing right now! 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 these answers This post on threads And This post on BlueSky,
“If you haven't played with Taunt Still, I think it is the most amazing technology for personal knowledge management. This is the next generation version of where the knowledge graph is going.” — Robert
“Maybe one show that's a little bit under the radar right now is the show AgencyA star-studded cast including Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright and Richard Gere. This is a show that demands a lot from its audience but rewards it richly.” – John
“I'm planning to build my second classic-tkl Keyboard from Novelkeys during the holidays. The real challenge will be figuring out what keycaps to put on it!” – Noah
“ABC Procedural high capacity The itch I've been feeling since the closure of similar concept shows like Monk, Psych or The Mentalist has been gone. Is it revolutionary…no. But if you like 'people with special talents solve crimes' then this is the show for you. – Mike
“One of the best shows about AI I saw last year, pantheonAMC Plus is on Netflix instead of Jail. Highly recommended!” – Saad
“It's not going to spread Christmas cheer, but last night I went to a theater near me to see OrderIt's had a fairly limited theatrical release (and on Prime Video in the rest of the world) but the movie is fantastic. It is based on real-life events involving a (more) violently divided group of Aryan nations in the Pacific Northwest. It's violent, it's scary, it's full of swear words and police clichés but it really happened.'' – John
“I'm quite late to the party but I'm really enjoying suika game For switch. It was a nice change of pace compared to what I usually play and today I managed to get my first watermelon.'' — Filip
“Read this before, but never finished the series, so I picked up the first one again Murderbot Diaries series and I'm (again) enjoying it a lot.'' – Dan
“Reading shallow By Nicholas Carr. This is a very serious text about our relationship with the Internet, written in a way that reveals the entire history of humans' relationship with technology, literacy, and information consumption. – Who
“That new superman Trailer!”- dance
signing off
One of my favorite stories is how things give rise to other things in ways no one could have seen coming. someone invented the elevatorAnd so skyscrapers were built, and cities were changed forever. Some lobbyists come up with this term “jaywalkingAnd suddenly cars dominated the road. Or what I discovered this week: how Invention of gang-nail plate Somewhat inadvertently forever changed the homes in which people live. Without a strange sheet of metal, we couldn't have an open floor plan. Strange. I love it. And I'm sure there are millions more examples like it. Blows my mind every time.
Have a nice holidays, see you in a few weeks!