Hello friends! welcome to Installer No. 148, your guide to the best and Edge-The most important things in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, I hope you’re enjoying all your pumpkin flavor, and you can also read all the old editions in the Installer main page.)
This week I have been reading about Marc Andreessen and the future of mathematics and mike tomlin and United Citizensremembering about the heyday of MySpacesending This article to everyone as an apology for my bad texts, listening to the Pet Shop Boys’ new alan turing album and Dwarkesh Patel’s thoughts on AIbarely avoiding booking a iPhone duoasking a lot of questions about it “Flying” Tesla Roadsterand endlessly buying tripods to hold my phone and watch social videos. I’ve been thinking too much about tripods this week.
I also have a couple of important new tech documents for you and a bunch of gadgets worth checking out. Gadget season, baby! Come on.
(As always, the best part of Installer They are your ideas and advice. What are you watching/reading/listening to/playing/throwing in the trunk this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy InstallerForward them and tell them to subscribe here).
- You can see everything. I can’t remember the last time I was so moved by a documentary (especially a three-hour one). The pairing of Elizabeth Holmes and Nathan Fielder, the shocking level of access, the incredible meta-ness of the whole project. I’ll see this as soon as I can. Oh, and after watching the documentary, check out Josh Johnson One Hour Set especially everything related to Elizabeth Holmes. Glorious.
- Musk. And here are four more hours of technical documentation! The reviews here are also spectacular, and even if you’ve been following the news for the last decade, I suspect watching it all back to back will be an experience.
- Apple Home View. I keep staring at the buy button on this new $299 starter hub. I’m actually not sure what I need it for (my very basic smart home works fine), but there’s something almost old school about the idea of this as a kind of family computer. I’m certainly in the market for fewer reasons to look at my phone.
- The new Siri remote control. I can’t in good conscience recommend a $300 Apple TV, but I can tell you to spend $60 on the new Find My-enabled remote! I mean, first wait until you lose the existing one. But you will. These remote controls are impossible.
- The Fairphone Fairbuds 2. I’ve come to like both Fairphone’s minimalist aesthetic and its emphasis on repairability, and the fact that it includes both in a lighter, smaller, more durable, and cheaper package than the AirPods is pretty exciting.
- The Xbox nanocontroller. Look at this little guy! A pocket game controller comes in handy more often than you think (it makes the waiting room a batch more fun), and this one has all the buttons you’d expect from Xbox and other games. If the battery life is good, this will be a winner.
- The Fitbit Edge. I have been using a fitbit air for a while, and I like it a lot, but do I miss having a fitness tracker that also told me the time. This one does that, plus a bit more biometric and training tracking. It’s not the prettiest bracelet I’ve ever seen, but it’s very Fitbit.
- The CMF S speaker. I love cool Bluetooth speakers, and these futuristic milk carton-looking devices are fabulous. I bought one of the small ones immediately and I’m already hesitating for a second to put together the stereo pair. More companies should make speakers that look good!
- Caleido ink 4. This isn’t so much a specific device as it is good news for an entire category of devices: we have a new version of the color E Ink panel found on many devices, with promises of better colors and better performance. Kaleido has disappointed many devices, but I’m excited to see what happens with this.
I have been reading Kevin RooseThe new book of The AGI Chroniclesthis week, and I really can’t recommend it enough. We sometimes make fun of Kevin for loving (and being loved by) AI too much, but this book is fabulously told, has taught me a lot, and makes many things about the AI industry make a lot more sense.
And Kevin isn’t done! He and (friend of Installer) Casey Newton is getting ready to launch her new show, Gods of machinessometime next week. (If you were a hard fork fan, you’ll have to listen to this one.) So I thought now was a good time to see how Kevin does everything, and if he’s just Claude Code-d himself out of existence completely. Have I been texting with the real Kevin this week? WHO KNOWS.
Here’s Kevin’s home screen, plus information about what apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 15 Pro (barely works, battery life is a joke, storage is full, but I’m waiting until I can pre-order the Duo and become a new man).
The wallpaper: A photo of my son fishing in the Russian River.
The applications: Voice Memos, WhatsApp, Signal, Spotify, Google Maps, Safari, Day One, Brick, Stash, Superwhisper, Substack, Slack, Town, Apple Notes, Phone, Gmail, Messages.
I am a big fan of dictations, I hardly write anymore and use Superwhisper and voice notes for everything. I vibrate coded a Pocket replacement called Stash That is still a pleasure many months later. (Building your own apps is a lot of fun!) And I’m running a swarm of AI agents that includes Skynet (my ChatGPT Pointwhich I use mainly for personal tasks), Hootie (my work agent, which runs in an app called City that Casey got me into) and Nancy (my Muse agent, who trades Kalshi on my behalf and has lost me $41 to date).
I have a “red flags” apps folder for social media and everything else I know is rotting my brain, a “green flags” folder for things I find vaguely enriching, and an AI folder for all my dumb little robots.
I also asked Kevin to share some things he’s interested in right now. This is what he sent:
- I am hopelessly addicted to Balatroa roguelike poker game that Casey got me into. (I will never forgive him for this).
- We’re starting a new podcast, our first on YouTube, so I’m watching a lot of popular YouTube shows like new heights and Good work to get ideas.
- For fun, I usually continue with my hobby channels: served (a tennis podcast hosted by Andy Roddick) and Rófle Lite (to Balatro streamer whose videos I sometimes fall asleep to), plus some things my son likes (Marcos Roberto, bluish, yoto stories) which I have also gotten into.
- My new favorite app right now is Dream Beansa truly insane Google Labs app that sends AI-generated illustrations of personalized suggestions for things to do every day. I open it up and say, “You can go bird watching at Point Reyes today,” and it’s just a stylized caricature of me looking at a heron through binoculars. I don’t think people know Dreambeans exists, but I love it and I’ll be sad for 6 months when Google shuts it down.
This is what Installer the community is in this week. I want to know what you’re up to now too! Email [email protected] or message me on Signal, @davidpierce.11, with your recommendations for anything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here each week. For even more great recommendations, check out the answers to this post in Threads and this post on Bluesky.
“I have been using the markdown writing app, em. I’ve been a fan of iA Writer for a long time, but this pairs so well with Ghost that it’s turned my head.” — Chris
“I just received my Bose Wired Headphonesand I haven’t been this excited and happy about a pair of headphones since AirPods.” – Sai
“I liked the application Shelf and history For finding good books for my children. Goodreads never convinced me to do that.” – Marta
“Made by the founder of TV Time, robbers It’s my new favorite media tracker. Lots of really cool features (like easily updating dates and auto-populating a watchlist). There’s still room for improvement, but it’s off to a great start and it’s the first thing I look for on Letterboxd these days.” — pegasusismo
“I just finished the most recent season of Jet lag: the game. Probably the best so far. A fantastic starting point for anyone new to this.” —Shane
“Carrieas soon as my internet provider resolves the outage affecting my area.” —Kev
“Doing my annual listening snow crash — It is worth revisiting in current times for anyone who has or has not had the pleasure (it is a PLEASURE to listen to Jonathan David).” -Jonatán
“I keep playingFire Emblem: The Weave of Fortune. I completed my first path. Just in time for the expansion pass to be announced.” — Connor
“I’ve been really hooked on small roguelikes, like the city builder and Balatro in Combined lands and the same turn but billiards in ultra pool. I’ve been playing them on the Steam Deck, which is nice with some mouse adjustments, but you need to be comfortable with the trackpads.” —Scott
I mentioned last week that I changed the notes app, this time to Capabilities. Again. Some of you asked me what finally clicked for me, and the answer is really simple: Capabilities has this concept of “objects” instead of “notes,” which treats everything you save as some kind of discrete thing. Images are treated and classified in a way; PDF other; the text points out another. Everything lives on its own, but it’s also organized by tags, dates, and whatever you want. Getting this setup right is a batch of work, because you have to create and adjust each object the way you want, but I spent an afternoon watching football and entering metadata and suddenly I can find things in my notes app again.
This system won’t be for everyone, even at the best of times it’s quite complicated, but if you end up playing with Capabilities, take a hard look at this page of the documentation first. It will help.
