Hello friends! welcome to Installer No. 33, your guide to the best and Edge-The most important things in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, I'm excited to have found us, and you can also read all the old editions in the Installer Homepage.)
This week I have been writing about The end of Google Podcasts. and the rise of artificial intelligence deviceslooking girls5eva and looking again Middleditch and Schwartzreading about the ubiquity of AllTrails and Danny McBride's Comedy Complexlistening to Ezra Klein song podcasts about ai, seeing if 5K runner can finally make me like to run and play too much retro goal.
I also have for you lots of smart ideas from people about ai, a bunch of new ai tools in web browsers, a fun new newsletter about good things on the Internet, a great rant about delivery apps, and much more. Come on.
Oh wait before we do! I'm going to be at the Chicago Humanities Festival next weekend, on stage talking about creativity and ai with Wonder Dynamics co-founders: Nikola Todorovic and Tye Sheridan. (You may know Tye best as an actor, including as Wade Watts in Ready player one. I have questions about that too.) Come hang out with us next Saturday if you're around! Well now let's get into it.
(As always, the best part of Installer They are your ideas and advice. What are you excited about right now? What are you watching, reading, or playing that everyone else should watch too? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy InstallerForward them and tell them to subscribe here).
The drop
- ai-feature-drops-local-llms/”>Opera's local ai. I know, I know, all browsers use ai features and I keep mentioning them. But Opera is doing something new and clever: it lets you download various open source ai models to your computer, so you can do ai stuff in the browser but also completely locally. I like it.
- “I made a Wikipedia graph… This is what I found.” This video broke my brain in the best way possible. It's just a narrator and a lot of graphics, but it shows how Wikipedia really works: the most linked articles, the platform's central topics, the fun dead ends. Wikipedia just keeps getting more impressive.
- brave lion. Another browser ai thing! Leo, Brave's Mixtral-based chatbot, is also trying to do ai in a privacy-preserving way, and I'm always here for that. leo now available on iOS, a couple of months after it arrived on Android, which means you can use Leo anywhere you use Brave. It is also integrated into the browser in a very close and useful way.
- “Jon Stewart on the false promises of ai.” The most succinct argument against ai you will ever hear. And he's not even really against ai, just against the hype cycle and the way it's talked about versus the way it's used. Also, Stewart's interview with Lina Khan about antitrust and artificial intelligence is fascinating and full of good streaming drama.
- Last Week Tonight on food delivery apps. Recommend both Jon Stewart and John Oliver: novel, right? We're really breaking new ground here. But this one is too good not to share, and not just because it stands out The edge. Delivery apps don't really work for anyone involved and Oliver solves the problem perfectly. And angry.
- Vintage. I'm skeptical about this and all the other possible “instagram, but they're your real friends again!” application. But I do like Retro's latest feature, Journals, which brings a collaborative album creation system to the app. I only do this in Google Photos, but it's a smart addition to any app like this.
- The Gotham City Lego set. Four thousand two hundred and ten pieces. I'm obsessed with this and, frankly, a little intimidated by it. The $300 price tag puts it in some serious luxury range, but this became the first and only thing on my birthday list this year.
- They were here. I don't recommend other newsletters here enough, and I'm going to change that, starting with this one from Hank and John Green, two of the best people on the Internet, who, at least so far, are simply a compendium of strange and delicious things from the Internet. Insta-subscription.
Share screen
As I write this newsletter, I have a big folder full of interesting splash screens I find on the web. (I should share some of them here, now that I think about it; we'll come back to that.) But very few things in that folder make me make the noise I made when I first saw it. Daniel Ansari Home Screen.
It turns out that Daniyal actually Build and sell these home screen designsalong with icons and widgets and other things — and I found myself flipping through them all, looking for tips on how to make my phone look so sleek, simple, and Cold like what Daniyal did. But I thought it was best to go to the source, so I asked him to share some tips with us.
Here's Daniyal's home screen, plus information about what apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 13 128 GB in starlight.
The wallpaper: The wallpapers are solid backgrounds in colors that match the dock. The HEX code is #F3F3F3 for light mode and #242424 for dark mode. Doing this hides the base completely, giving my home screens a cleaner look.
The applications: I try to keep my home screen clean. The application I like the most is YouTube Music. It's not that popular, but the combination of YouTube Premium and YouTube Music makes a lot of sense to me. I keep the notes app handy and have different folders in it to dump information in a categorized way.
I create custom widgets using an app called Widgy in the app store. It's an amazing app that syncs with Apple's built-in apps and presents information like weather, calendar events, reminders, etc., with a variety of customization options, allowing you to create the look and feel you want. I also use two apps called MD blank and Transparent app icons that allow you to create empty spaces on your home screen (since Apple doesn't allow us to).
I also asked Daniyal to share some things he's interested in right now. This is what she sent:
- The program I like now is Drive to survive. I started following Formula One a few years ago and loved how engineering and sport come together.
- I really like productivity apps and really enjoyed them. he waveform episode with you. I have started using Notions calendarAnd yes, the three-day view is amazing.
- The creators I follow the most are MKBHD and StarTalk with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tysonbut I want to mention especially David Imel. He only has five videos on his YouTube channel (he should make more), but the way he explains each concept is exceptional. It's almost like he's a really cool teacher who's really good at clarifying the fundamentals. His”How the Italian Renaissance can save the smartphone camera” is my favorite YouTube video of all time. As a literature graduate and technology enthusiast, that video fits my interests.
Collective participation
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 send a message to +1 (203) 570-8663 with your recommendations for anything, and we'll feature some of our favorites here each week.
“As Artifact has become a dead Yahoo product, I've moved to ai-rss-news%2Fid6476572500″>Bulletin for iOS and Mac, which I'm really enjoying.” — Justin
“The way you described Tiny Desk as 'everything wonderful about the Internet' is the way I would describe flavor journey, a YouTube channel and DJ partner from Luxembourg. They broadcast their chill house music sets (often accompanied by live guitar) from locations across Europe. During the set, they also prepare a meal. It feels less like watching a DJ set and more like hanging out with friends. Here's a recent favorite.” -Daniel
“Running my own personal single-user Mastodon instance, courtesy of Masto.host. Can read about my experience if you're interested”. – Miguel
“If you like squeaky music, we're in a golden age for it right now. The new wrist meter It is a modern classic, the new Boundaries It's going very hard, death metal veterans Aborted released one of their best albums, fresh from melodic/technological death carrion vael released a great album, OG bands like I work for a cowboy and The darker hour They published some of their best work. “It’s just a great time for us to like music where everyone is beating each other up at concerts.” -John
“Good luck It's a very opinionated, keyboard-driven task manager; I think more people should try it.” – mate
“I love games that take two completely unrelated genres and mix them together. peglin you accept Peggle and turns it into a roguelike. The more pegs you hit, the more damage you will do to enemies. There are different balls with different effects and power-ups that you can collect. I’ve been playing it on my phone and it’s a great way to kill time on the train ride.” – Voltaire
“I would like to recommend Letters. It is a simple application to keep lists. I started using it to track books, board games, movies, and TV shows. I used to use the standard Notes app for this, but Listy is much easier to use because you can use your browser's Share feature to add a new entry.” —Pedro
“Picotron. It's a little niche, but for a certain type of person, it's gold. It's a “fantasy workstation” of the kind that made Pico-8. Still in its infancy and with many bugs, but very exciting in these early days, almost like a return to the early days of computing. “People are already creating web browsers, calculators, and primitive games.” – Thomas
“Gideon the ninth It is the funniest, wildest, craziest, most attractive and unmissable book I have read FOREVER. Crazy Plot… The eight feudal houses of the Eternal Emperor, Necrolord Prime, send their adept necromancers and primal knights across the solar system to undergo challenges with the goal of becoming Lyctors to serve their emperor. Extremely descriptive/visual and perfect to represent as a movie or miniseries. Highly recommended!” —Tyler
Sign off
This is the least surprising thing I'll write all week: love videos about people's settings. Studio tours, desktop tours, home screen deep dives, anything. I love it as a way to see how people work and think, and I'm convinced that you can learn a lot about people if you learn how they organize their spaces, both virtual and physical, which is probably why I've seen now this video from Adam Savage's “beautifully chaotic” studio about six times. The place is a disaster and it is also carefully thought out and organized. There's a story there about every little bit of it all. And it's about making things work, not making them pretty. I swear, there are like 60 life lessons in this study alone. And now I also have a deep desire to buy table saws. This is going to be a problem.
