Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 93, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, I’m sad the sun is setting sooner, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’m reading about the rise of GEO, laughing at Kirby’s new shapes, acknowledging Google’s good dunk on Apple, thinking of the best Wordle puzzle I can make, wondering if I’ll ever see Microsoft’s Windows XP-themed Crocs out in the wild, following the progress of The Bluesky Dictionary, and watching Antoni Porowski’s excellent Architectural Digest Open Door episode.
I also have for you some AI news from OpenAI, a bug-filled new season of Fortnite, a Site of the Year competition, and more.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What do you want to know more about? What awesome tricks do you know that everyone else should? What app should everyone be using? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)
- OpenAI’s GPT-5: OpenAI’s next major AI model is finally out. The company promises it has “state-of-the-art performance” across many different types of work and is “significantly less likely to hallucinate” than its previous models. You can try it out right now in ChatGPT, even if you’re on the free plan.
- OpenAI’s GPT-OSS: Ahead of GPT-5, OpenAI also made a splash with the release of GPT-OSS, its two new open-weight models that you can run on a laptop. Having the power of an OpenAI model, with the privacy of a local model, is perhaps an even more compelling option.
- Roku’s Howdy: This new subscription service has “thousands of titles” available ad-free for $2.99 per month. It’s a lot of older stuff — when I wrote this, the website featured things like Dirty Dancing, Reservoir Dogs, and Weeds — but for no ads and a way cheaper price than a lot of other streaming services, I could see this being a huge hit.
- TP-Link’s Wi-Fi 7 BE3600 Travel Router: This Wi-Fi 7 travel router seems like it could save you some wireless connection hassles while on a big family trip. It works with up to 90 devices at once, which I’m guessing will be more than enough for most families.
- Camp Snap CS-8: This camera looks a bit like a classic Super 8 film camera, and while it uses SD card storage, there’s no screen you can use to see what you’ve shot. That could be annoying, but I also think it could be really fun.
- Fortnite’s new Shock ‘N Awesome season: The latest battle royale update adds bug infestations to the Fortnite island, but you can take them on as a Power Ranger. This seems like a season made for 90s kids, so I don’t think I’ll be able to resist checking this out.
- Is This Seat Taken?: If you’re looking for something a little lower key, this chill new puzzle game that asks you to find the right seat for adorable little shapes is great. I’ve played the whole thing, and it’s delightful.
- The 2025 Tiny Awards nominations: You have until September 1st to vote on one of 11 extremely cool websites to be Site of the Year. I haven’t decided on my pick, but I’m a big fan of Cloudgazing.
Today, I’m featuring Siri Ramos, the founder of Mechanism, which makes mounts and grips for handheld gaming devices like the Steam Deck and the Nintendo Switch 2. I unexpectedly met Siri at a recent Triple Click live recording, and I reached out because I thought he might have an interesting homescreen. My hunch was right — I’ll let him share more:
“A few months ago I realized how much time I was wasting on my phone and decided to make it less appealing and more functional. Instead of buying a minimal phone like the Light Phone, I decided to convert my iPhone 14 Pro into a dopamine-reduced version to test. I also use a matte screen protector to complete the Light phone look, which is surprisingly cool.
The wallpaper: A boring grey to mimic the Light Phone
- Notion Calendar widget
- Macrofactor widget: a great algorithmic nutrition tracker that works for both gaining and losing weight, depending on your goals.
- Weather: the stock iOS Weather app
The main homescreen apps:
- Notion Calendar (again), with color-matched background
- SyncTasks: takes your Notion tasks and syncs them to a sweet interactive homescreen widget
The homescreen apps on page two:
- Blank Spaces Launcher: This allows you to have an app list like shown, mimicking the Light Phone. You can change the names of the apps to be generic. Like “Podcasts” leads to Overcast, my podcast app of choice. Or “Workout” leads to Stronglifts 5×5, etc.
The docked apps: I used a minimal black icon pack mixed with Siri shortcuts, except for the Superhuman email app.
I also asked Siri to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he said:
- I just binged the 7th novel of Dungeon Crawler Carl so fast it was silly. Incredibly fun reads that are somewhat hard to describe. Maybe like… Hunger Games meets video games? Light-hearted and eminently binge-able.
- Who isn’t into Donkey Kong Bananza right now? I’m just finishing up the snow / ice sublayer.
- For some reason, chess recently got its addictive claws into me. It’s so much easier to justify than doomscrolling since it pretends to be a brain exercise. Maybe I need to detox from this one too…
- I’m big into kiteboarding (I go to Hood River a ton for this), and I just got the Surfr app on my Apple Watch to track my jump heights in real time. It’s pretty cool!
Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email [email protected] with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on The Verge, this post on Threads, and this post on Bluesky.
“For the first time in a few years I’m playing around with some embedded programming platforms, specifically Arduino and the Pi Pico. It’s amazing that I can get a computer more powerful than the desktop I owned in high school for less than ten dollars.” — Matthew
“Just got my new CRKD guitar, loving it, and diving back into Clone Hero and YARG, the modern open source versions of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. And great timing, Red Octane is back to make a new rhythm game!” — Bruno
“I’m deeply impressed by the Lord of the Rings audiobook by Andy Serkis. It’s insane how differently the characters sound (and how similar to movies).” — Jakub
“This week I took control of my RSS reader by moving from Inoreader to a self-hosted Miniflux instance. It was actually super easy to get working, and it’s cool to be able to use different third-party native apps again. It feels like I’m back in the good ol’ Google Reader days again.” — gnu_slash_dhruv
“I’ve been watching Superman: The Animated Series on HBO Max. I love how the series makes the most of its sci-fi premise, alongside compelling cinematography and stirring music. Highly recommend!” — Blue Savoy
“This video from Julian O’Shea about cars getting huge is extremely well done, and the part about pedestrian fatalities is legitimately moving. If you’re in need of lighter fare, CityNerd’s new video about the Vegas Loop being pathetically stupid is a great follow up piece.” — cowboyxboombap
“I use a mostly-QWERTY layout, but have a ZSA Moonlander keyboard and have customized it to my programmer/game tastes. I can actually touch-type now with this keyboard. It folds up so well that I travel with it all the time, and it gets comments every time I use it. — Ron
“I’d like to recommend Apocalypse Hotel! It’s a charming anime about a group of robots running a hotel long after humanity left the planet. It’s got a lovely bittersweet but optimistic mood to it as they wait patiently for humanity to return. And it’s quite funny as well.” — Graham
Thanks to everyone who wrote in their stories of alternate keyboard layouts. There’s a fair few Dvorak users out there, but I heard from a fellow Colemak typist and even a Norman user! If you’re interested in trying an alternate keyboard, I actually recommend the challenge — it’s a fun way to re-wire your computer brain. (And maybe give yourself a chance to fix some bad typing habits.)
Also thank you very much to Troy, who, in response to my comment about considering a TV on wheels, shared the setup he uses. “If you are interested in a rolling TV, what we did was purchase a rolling TV stand from Amazon for $99, a 43-inch TCL Roku TV, and a $20 cover. Works great, we use it all over the house and backyard.” If I had more closet space to “store” our TV when we weren’t using it, I would have ordered a cart and a cover yesterday. Someday, though, I’m sure I’m going to end up trying to live this life.
