Hello friends! Welcome to Install #115, your guide to the best a Rod– the best thing in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, go to Seahawks I guess, and you can also read all the old issues at Install homepage.)
This week I read about The Washington Post and The Murdochs and Polymarket and whatever”Soho House for creators” is tracking Independence Day for the first time and Jurassic Park for about 50. bail on everything in the next few weeks to watch olympic games a full-time, timeline-task-manager-loving look passportlearning more about Furby than I ever expected for the upcoming season Version historyand trying to learn Claude how to clean email inbox
I’ve also got the best way to watch sports for the next few weeks, a great update to a great bookmarking app, lots of fun nostalgic stuff and much more. Also, don’t forget to send me your favorite non-Big Tech apps! I’ve heard from a lot of you about the email apps, productivity tools, office suites, and messaging platforms you’ve switched to, and I want to hear more. There will be much more next week. For now, let’s cut to the chase.
(As always the best part Install are your ideas and tips. What are you watching / playing / reading / listening / hacking with OpenClaw this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy it Installforward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)
- Peacock’s Gold Zone. This isn’t exactly a new thing, really, just a PSA: For my money, there’s no better way to watch the Olympics than through the Golden Zone, which spreads around the games to show you the most interesting things happening at any given moment. Peacock is generally the best app for watching the Olympics (at least in the US) and I suspect I’ll be watching way too much of it over the next few weeks.
- Raindrop.io Stella. A big update to my favorite AI-based bookmarking app. So far, it’s what you’d expect: a much better way to search, ask questions, and otherwise interact with your bookmarks. After trying a bunch of other apps, I recently came back to Raindrop and this one comes at the perfect time.
- Super Nintendo. I really don’t think there is another company like Nintendo. Keza MacDonald’s book is a business story, a gaming story, and more than that – I’ve only just started reading it and I’ve already learned a lot. (By the way, stay tuned: an excerpt from the book is running on the site on Monday.)
- Codex for Mac. OpenAI’s answer to Claude Code has a desktop app and I’ve heard pretty good things about it. I’m particularly interested in the Automation feature, which I intend to use to clean out my Downloads folder every week or so.
- The Muppet Show. The Muppets were such a big part of my childhood and it’s so weird that my own kids barely saw them. This new special is modern – Sabrina Carpenter and Seth Rogen are in it! — and perfectly timeless. I will make my kids watch it 65,000 times.
- “You are being lied to about renewable energy technology.” After listening to Alek at large Workflow status series, I watched a lot of Technology Connections. This one is rightfully going viral because it’s a rare mix of the totally sane and the totally outrageous.
- Dragon Quest VII Reimagined. I swear once a week someone posts a remastered game that makes me go, “Oh man, I forgot about that game!” Somehow the series is 40 years old, and while I’m not entirely comfortable with the cartoony screenshots, I suspect a lot of people will want to dig into it.
- RetroVa Vintage Imaging Kit. Yes, it’s a Kickstarter, so go ahead and deposit. But: We’ve seen the company’s camera lens extenders work on Vivo and Oppo phones, so there’s good reason to believe this kit will work well on iPhones, too. (Too bad a lot of the features look like they require a proprietary app.)
- Queen of Chess. Before this hit Netflix documentary, I confess I knew next to nothing about Judit Polgár, who in 1991 became the youngest chess grandmaster of all time. Her story is remarkable, as is the way chess is portrayed in this film – very much so Queen’s Gambitin the best way.
I read an essay a few weeks ago that I haven’t stopped thinking about since. It’s called “Phantom Obligation” and it starts with a really fun question: Why do RSS readers look like email clients? Essay, by Terry Godieris a fascinating argument about how we structure and consume information, why we need to rethink decades-old ideas about interfaces, and why we need to escape the feeling that email inboxes give us.
Terry’s essay went viral, especially when it was revealed that he was creating an app called Current he hoped he might be a better conception of the medium. (Not to brag, but he promised to get me on TestFlight.) He also wrote a thoughtful essay this week about the state of podcasts, and it turns out he has some thoughts there, too. I love how he thinks about products in general, so I asked him to share his home screen to get an idea of what else he likes.
Here is Terry’s home screen and some information about the apps he uses and why:
phone: iPhone 17 Pro Max.
wallpaper: On the lock screen: just a sweet, impossible, obviously unreal space shot of the moon from a mountain range without any atmosphere. On the home screen: nothing, nada. Just solid black which is either every color combined or no color at all. I’m not sure which one it is, but it’s probably one of them.
Application: Find My, Fastmail, Fantastical, ChatGPT, Claude, Carrot Weather, Photos, Things, Reddit, Instagram, Margin, Current, Ivory, Are.na, Bear, Recollect, Phone, Messages, Safari.
I have a home folder in the top left corner that contains all my various home automation apps (I’m too lazy to finish my HomeAssistant). Then Find My because my kids love to see where mom is and how long it will be until she gets home. Fastmailwhich is my email provider; Fantasticwhich I use because it’s nice to be able to put natural language notifications on the calendar and my house runs on calendar invites.
The media folder contains things like Nugs (sweet streaming concert videos), music, Patreonetc. There are also my two handy robot friends ChatGPT and Claude… and Carrot weatherwhich is actually pretty much a robot, so I think I have three robot friends. And two note apps, Bear (classics) a Recollect.fyi, which is something my friend Jon did and I adore (it’s a PWA!)
I also asked Terry to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what they feel back:
Here’s what Install community is in this week. I also want to know what you are doing right now! E-mail installer@theverge.com or send me a message on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here each week. For even more great recommendations, check out the answers to this thread post and this post on Bluesky.
“I took an old mini desktop PC and threw it away Batocera on it to play emulated games with a nice frontend and earn RetroAchievements while playing some old classics!’ —Chris
“Timothy Zahn Heir to the Empire trilogywhich is considered the best series of Star Wars books. I absolutely loved it and highly recommend it to people who appreciate the franchise, specifically Audible audiobooks which are complete with voice acting, sound effects and a John Williams soundtrack!” -Noah
“I started using this app called Fiter to track my workouts. If you’ve been using Apple Notes to track workouts and then manually importing them into Microsoft Excel at home for visualization, then this solves this (very niche, albeit real) problem. Oh and the design of the app is beautiful and reminds me a lot Food Nouns.” —Athan
“Watching the new series Um, actually on Dropout, as well as rewatching some of my other top Dropout shows (Game Changer, VIPetc.). Have I mentioned how much I love Dropout? —Andrew
“Switching to Linux Mint removed all Windows bloat and breathed new life into my eight-year-old laptop; it’s now much faster and more enjoyable to use (and no ads in the Start menu!).” -Sleepy
“I would like to recommend a podcast / YouTube channel BS Phototime. It features two accomplished and intelligent photographers, Sissi Lu and Birgit Buchart. With only three episodes to date, they’re still finding their groove, but it’s definitely refreshing to have less gear/spec focused conversations and more focus on the art of photography.” -Mark
“Tracking Wonder Man! It’s like LA LA Land of Marvel” — Jeremy
“I’m reading.” Chronicles of Liquid SocietyUmberto Eco’s last book. A collection of his editorials that read like blog posts. They range from 2000 onwards, so some topics are now quaint (like the improbable idea from 2004 that every kid has a computer in the classroom). -Rich
Last week, thanks to Chris Mims, I spent some time on BBC Archive YouTube channel. This apparently convinced YouTube’s algorithm that all I wanted were really old TV segments – and honestly, it was right.
When I did not look forward to the treasury well arranged clips from the old Top Gear crewI watched a lot of old news clips from the early days of personal computers and the internet. Almost all of them were older than anything I remember and it was extremely cool and extremely useful to go back to the days of computers too hard even for simple tasks when Elon Musk was just a beginner boy and Jeff Bezos was just a bookseller and when was satellite navigation the most sci-fi thing so that this never happens to your car.
Besides all the “ah, simpler times” vibes I get from these videos, they’re a practical reminder of how exciting new technology can really be — and how much more we should think about the implications before these nifty new things become too big. New technology can be great! We just have to do it that way.