Hello friends! you are welcome installer Number 115, your guide to the best and the verge-The best stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome to I think, Go Seahawks, and you can also read all the older editions here installer home page.)
This week, I’m reading about Washington Post And Murdoch And polymarket and whatever”Soho House for Creators” is watching Independence Day for the first time and Jurassic Park For about day 50, putting everything on hold for the next few weeks so I can see olympics Preferring the full-time, timeline-task-manager look PasoLearn More about Furby As much as I thought for the upcoming season version historyand trying to teach cloud How do I clear my email inbox?
I’ve got the best way to watch sports for you over the next few weeks, a cool update to a great bookmarking app, a bunch of fun nostalgia stuff, and much more. Too, Don’t forget to send me your favorite non-Big Tech apps! I’ve heard from many 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 more on this next week. For now, let’s dive in.
(As always, the best part of installer Have your thoughts and suggestions. What are you watching/playing/reading/listening/hacking with OpenClaw this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know anyone else who might enjoy installerForward this to them and ask them to subscribe here.)
- Peacock’s Golden Field. This isn’t really anything new, really, just a PSA: For my money there’s no better way to watch the Olympics than Gold Zone, which shows you the most interesting stuff happening at any given time around the Games. Peacock is generally the best app for watching the Olympics (at least in the US), and I suspect I’ll be watching it a lot over the next few weeks.
- Raindrop.io Stella. A big AI-powered update to my favorite bookmarking app. So far, it’s what you’d expect: a better way to discover, ask questions about, and otherwise interact with your bookmarks. After trying a bunch of other apps, I recently came back to Raindrop, and it came at just the right time.
- super nintendo. I really don’t think there is any other company like Nintendo. Keiza MacDonald’s book is a business story, a sports story, and much more – I’ve just started reading it and I’ve learned a lot already. (By the way, stay tuned: We’ll have an excerpt from the book running on the site on Monday.)
- codecs for mac. OpenAI’s answer to cloud code is a desktop app, and I’m hearing great things about it. I’m particularly attracted to the Automation feature, which I like to use to help me clean up my Downloads folder every week.
- The Muppet Show. The Muppets were a huge part of my childhood, and it’s so weird that my own kids have barely seen them. This new special is both modern – Sabrina Carpenter and Seth Rogen are in it! – And absolutely timeless. I’m going to show this to my kids 65,000 times.
- “You are being misled about renewable energy technology” after listening to alec on the great Workflow status series, I’m seeing a lot of technology connections. It’s rightfully going viral, because it’s a rare mix of completely reasonable and completely infuriating.
- Dragon Quest VII Reimagined. I swear, once a week someone sends a remastered game that makes me go “Oh, man, I forgot about that game!” Somehow this series is 40 years old, and although the cartoony screenshots don’t entirely do it for me, I suspect a lot of people will enjoy digging back into it.
- Retrova Vintage Imaging Kit. Yes, this is a Kickstarter, so proceed with caution. But: We’ve seen this company’s smartphone camera lens extender work on Vivo and Oppo phones, so there’s good reason to believe this kit will work well on the iPhone too. (Although a lot of the features look like they require a proprietary app.)
- chess queen. Before this documentary hit Netflix, I confess I knew almost nothing about Judit Polgar, who in 1991 became the youngest chess grandmaster of all time. His story is remarkable, and the way chess is depicted in this film is also remarkable queen’s stakein the best way.
A few weeks ago, I read an essay that I haven’t stopped thinking about since. It’s called “Phantom Obligation” and it starts with a very funny question: Why do RSS readers look like email clients? essay, by terry godierThere’s 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 of inbox providing.
Terry’s essay went viral, especially after it was revealed that he was creating an app called current He hoped that this medium could be better. (Not to brag, but he promised to include me in TestFlight.) This week, he also wrote a thoughtful essay about the state of podcasts, and turns out he has some thoughts, too. I like the way he thinks about products in general, so I asked him to share his homescreen to find out what else he likes.
Here’s Terry’s homescreen, along with some information about the apps he uses and why:
phone: iPhone 17 Pro Max.
Wallpaper: On the lockscreen: Just a lovely, impossible, obviously-not-real outer space image of the Moon, as seen from a mountain range, where there is no atmosphere whatsoever. On the homescreen: Nothing, nada. Only solid black, which has either all colors combined or no colors at all. I’m not sure which one it is, but it’s probably one of them.
Apps: Find My, Fastmail, Fantastical, ChatGPT, Cloud, 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 that contains all my various home automation apps (I’m too lazy to complete my HomeAssistant rig). Then Find My, because my kids love to see where mom is and how long it will take them to get home. fastmailWhich is my email provider; fantasticWhich I use because it’s nice to be able to insert calendar notifications with natural language and my house runs on calendar invites.
Media folder contains items nugs (melodious streaming concert video), music, patreonEtcetera. I also have two useful robot friends, ChatGPT and Cloud… more carrot seasonWhich is actually pretty much a robot, so I guess I have three robot friends. and two notes apps, Bear (a classic) and remember.fyi, Which my friend John made and I love (it’s a PWA!).
I also asked Terry to share some of the things he’s interested in right now. Here’s what he sent back:
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 each week. For more great recommendations, check out these answers This post on threads And This post on BlueSky.
“I took an old mini desktop PC and threw Batocera on this so that I can play exemplary games with good front end and earn retro achievements Playing some old classics!” -Chris
“Timothy Zahn’s heir to the empire TrilogyWhich is considered to be the best series of Star Wars books. I loved it, and highly recommend it, especially to people who appreciate this franchise. audible audiobooks Which is complete with voice acting, sound effects and a John Williams soundtrack! – Noah
“I have started using this app Fitera To track my workouts. If you were using Apple Notes to track workouts and then manually importing them into Microsoft Excel at home to visualize them, this solves that (very specific, albeit real) problem. Oh, the design of the app is so beautiful and reminds me a lot foodnomes” -Athan
“Watching the new series of.” umm, actually on Dropout, as well as rewatching some of my other Dropout top shows (game changer, vipetc.). Have I mentioned how much I love Dropout?” – Andrew
“switching to linux mint Removed all the bloat from Windows and breathed new life into my eight year old laptop; It’s now much faster and pleasant to use (and no Start Menu ads!).” – Sleep
“I would like to recommend the podcast/Youtube channel bs phototime. It features two accomplished and intelligent photographers, Sissi Lu and Birgitte Bouckart. With only three episodes so far, they’re still finding their groove, but it’s definitely refreshing to have less gear-centric/specs-driven conversations that focus more on the art of photography. – Mark
“Watching wonder man! It feels like Marvel’s La La Land” – Jeremy
“I am studying History of a liquid societyUmberto Eco’s last book. A collection of his editorials that read like blog posts. They’re from after 2000, so some topics are strange now (like the unbelievable idea in 2004 that every kid has a computer in the classroom). – Rich
Last week, thanks to Chris Mims, I spent some time BBC Archive YouTube channel. This apparently convinced the YouTube algorithm that I really wanted the old TV segments – and honestly, it was right.
When I’m not enjoying well-curated treasures clips from old top Gear crewI’ve been watching a lot of old news clips from the early days of personal computing and the Internet. Almost all of them pre-date anything I remember, and it’s been extremely cool and extremely helpful to go back to the time when PCs were the road is very difficult Even for simple tasks, when Elon Musk was just a startup guy and jeff bezos He was just a bookseller, And when there was satellite navigation the most sci-fi thing This can happen to your car at any time.
Besides all the “ah, simpler times” I get from these videos, they’re a useful reminder of how exciting new technology can really be – and how much more we should think about the implications of these new things before they become too big. New technology can be great! We just have to make it that way.
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