Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 149, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy It Actually Feels Like Fall Now At Least In My Neighborhood), and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I've been reading about Demis Hassabis and computer chips and permafrost, enjoying the first episodes of Machine Gods, filming the next season of Version History (pet season!), seeing You Can See Everything and then reading and listening to absolutely everything about it, painstakingly updating all the stuff in my 1Password, making tiny documents with Tiny Little O …Read the full story at The Verge.

Google Drive is a simple place to store documents you need across devices or share with others. Google has also added Gemini to Drive, so you can ask questions about your files and get summaries without reading through them yourself. As you'd guess, those features work by processing the information inside your documents. Google’s broader smart-feature settings also let it use your content and activity for personalization across Workspace, which goes far beyond keeping your files available across devices. I find that concerning because many of the files I save in Google Drive contain information I wouldn’t casually hand over to another service.

Across several decades in Hollywood, Caleb Deschanel has seen a lot. He served as cinematographer on films like The Passion of the Christ and The Patriot, worked on sequences in The Godfather and Titanic, and directed a few episodes of Twin Peaks. Even still, nothing could quite prepare him for his first stop-motion project: working as the cinematographer on Wildwood, the latest release from Coraline studio Laika. While he knew that stop-motion was a long and involved process, he was still surprised by just how much work went into these movies. "When I started I thought it was one thing, and then I quickly found out that it was another thing …Read the full story at The Verge.

With KDE Plasma 6.8 now out, people are finding new and exciting ways to break the desktop environment in two. As such, the maintainers have gone into a big bug-fixing spree to ensure 6.8 is as good as it can be. Fortunately, the team found some room to squeeze some handy new features into KDE Plasma 6.9, including getting Wayland's picture-in-picture mode working.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've taken to revisiting some of the greatest releases of the N64, PS2, and pre-2010 PC era, specifically the titles that defined what a great gaming experience is for me, and probably for many others like myself. Most of them were products of their time, and running them on modern hardware often tends to expose traces and hints of the various "optimizations" that stayed invisible on the hardware they were built for.

Notion is often the first app that comes to mind for managing notes, projects, and everyday work. But it's not the only option worth considering. I've been looking for a tool that gives me more freedom over how I work without adding unnecessary complexity. Obsidian and OneNote are popular choices, but I found another app that deserves more attention. Anytype takes a different approach to productivity, and some of its features make it a compelling alternative to Notion. Here's why it caught my attention and why it's worth trying.

Xbox's first chief operating officer (COO) is leaving after the new role was created just a few months ago. Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today, according to an internal Xbox memo seen by The Verge. Chiang has been at Microsoft for 21 years, serving as the head of Minecraft before being promoted to Xbox chief operating officer in July.Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced Chiang's departure in a surprisingly short memo today. "Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today. I'm grateful for her years of service and wish her well," said Sharma. As Chiang is departing today, her immediate responsibilities are being split up between other Xbox leaders …Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI is now training its most advanced AI models without internet access following a string of rogue hacking incidents. In a blog post on Friday, OpenAI says it built an offline testing environment where AI models can interact with indexed and cached web content "without risk of affecting external systems."OpenAI paused training its frontier AI models in September, after disclosing several incidents in which its AI agents broke out of their testing environments to hack third-party companies and government agencies, or swarm obscure websites. On October 1st, OpenAI resumed reinforcement learning training and internal inference with tighte …Read the full story at The Verge.

I have been running an 8-year-old Dell laptop, repurposed as my home server, for more than a year. You know what is one of the annoying things about it? Whenever I need to access the BIOS, I have to take the laptop out of the corner I tucked it into, open the lid, reboot it, and keep pressing F2 to get in. And if I miss the Dell logo, I have to repeat the steps.

It has been a little more than a month since WSL 3.0.1 came out, and it's already changing the way I run my Linux containers. One of the most distinctive features that interested me is the fact that it adds the wslc command that can pull images, run containers, map ports, and even build images from a Containerfile straight from PowerShell or CMD.

Self-hosting lets me run my favorite tools on my own terms, without relying entirely on third-party services. For a long time, that freedom was all I cared about. I could experiment with different apps, tweak settings, and build a setup that suited my workflow. But things started to change when I began sharing those services with other people. What worked perfectly for me didn't always work as smoothly for them. I soon discovered that self-hosting involves more than getting an app running. As my setup grew, I had to rethink my approach.

It's not lost on me that any one of Anthropic's models can outperform the models I run on my 16GB Nvidia GPU. I'd wager even Sonnet 5.5 can write much better code, keep track of conversations that just go on and on, and catch mistakes that both my Qwen3.6 and Gemma 4 would walk right past. If you put them side by side on any benchmark, Claude will take the win in literally any workflow, and it won't be close.