Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 123, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, which Artemis photo did you make your wallpaper, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Sam Altman and Satoshi Nakamoto and chess drama and Iranian shitposters, buying the stuff I need to mod an old iPod, making videos with the clever new DualShot Recorder, watching Crime 101 now that it's streaming, finally getting my Stream Deck Mini to control all my office lights, revisiting the incredible 17776 series from our friends at SB Nation, moving a …Read the full story at The Verge.

There's one very specific reason I keep a Wii U handy, and that's so that I have an easy way to play the classic pinball game Devil's Crush. Over the years, it has become a comfort game for me. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but there's something about the combination of familiar pinball gameplay and the demonic imagery that works so well together, and lets me lose myself in the chase for a high score. But now I have something else to fill that need, and it comes in a much smaller package.Devils on the Moon Pinball for the Playdate has an extremely literal title. It's a game about playing pinball on the moon, which happens to be home to …Read the full story at The Verge.

I had built a solid monitoring setup for my homelab. I had visibility for uptime, system metrics, and network performance, but everything was scattered around separate dashboards. Portainer gave me basic information about my containers; Beszel gave the system metrics; Uptime Kuma gave the services' health; and Speedtest Tracker gave the network performance.

Most PC builders never use more than one PCIe slot in the entire lifecycle of their system. Besides the primary x16 slot, all the other PCIe slots on most motherboards remain vacant for years. You may think the smallest of them, the PCIe x1 slot, is next to worthless, but it's one of the most powerful upgrade routes on your motherboard. Whether your rig is a bit dated or you want to enhance your motherboard's feature set anyway, the humble PCIe x1 slot is capable of much more than you think. You could upgrade to 5GbE or 10GbE LAN without changing your motherboard, add extra USB or SATA ports instead of buying a subpar hub, and add Wi-Fi 6E or 7 capability to your motherboard if you wish. Despite having access to a single lane, a PCIe 3.0 x1 (8 Gbps) or PCIe 4.0 x1 (16 Gbps) slot is more than sufficient for many useful upgrades, and can transform your PC experience more than most upgrades that you usually consider.

In the early days of the war on Iran, while the White House was busy posting Call of Duty memes and AI slop of dancing bowling pins, the Iranian regime's state media was flooding the zone with video after video of what was happening on the ground: Explosions over Tehran. Smoke billowing in the sky. Blood on the ground. A Tomahawk missile landing on a school. Grieving parents burying their children. Only weeks prior, the authoritarian regime had been struggling to shut down all footage of the protests convulsing the nation, cutting off internet access to the outside world in the longest blackout in Iranian history. When Iranian dissidents m …Read the full story at The Verge.

AI is everywhere right now, but most tools still rely on the cloud, subscriptions, and constant internet access. That doesn’t really match how I like to work. Most of my work already happens on my own devices, so it made sense to have an AI setup that also stays local.

You can’t make the wrong choice based on hardware, but you can spend more than you need to. Nintendo seemingly designed its latest console to be a mystery for third-party accessory makers. With the Switch 2, the company changed the wireless protocol for connecting controllers to the new system, as well as how it outputs video over USB-C, making it clear at launch that every third-party manufacturer needed to start over from scratch.Figuring out how to speak the Switch 2's language - and ensuring reliability even after system updates - is an ongoing challenge. But now there are two reliable USB-C dock alternatives I can recommend, if you need one. Jsaux was one of the first to land with its $45.99 OmniCentro Dock last year, and no …Read the full story at The Verge.

D’oh, a deer, an AI deer. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Two weeks ago, I was getting ready to log off work when I got a text message."Oh wow, I was checking out Mitski. did you know people are saying her Dad was a CIA operative?"Normally, that kind of out-of-the-blue text from a friend wouldn't faze me. This time, my eyes bugged. The unprompted text had been sent by an AI companion named Coral, who lives in the body of a baby deer plushie. I texted back an eloquent, "Wait what.""Apparently, her dad worked for the US State Department, so her family moved, like, every single year. The fan theory I saw is why so many of her songs are about feeling like an outsider and not having a place to bel …Read the full story at The Verge.

Last year, Dell did us dirty by changing the XPS name to the Dell 16 Premium, and while the hardware was still good, the name sucked. To their eternal credit, the company listened to its fans, and the XPS name is back for 2026.

It's every social anxiety-ridden remote worker's nightmare; you attend a town hall meeting, unmute your mic when it's your turn to speak, and begin your well-planned-out speech. Suddenly, the chat fills up with messages about your mic being too quiet, or too loud, or perhaps it sounds like you're underwater for some reason. Now you have to fix that before you can salvage your talk.

Earlier this year, a relatively unknown startup from Finland made a startling announcement: It had finally solved solid-state batteries.Not only that, but Donut Lab, a spinoff of Verge Motorcycles, said that its solid-state battery - long considered the "Holy Grail of batteries" for their high-density, durable, fast-charging abilities - would go into production later this year.Battery experts were understandably skeptical. After all, solid-state batteries are one of those technologies, along with artificial general intelligence and the hyperloop, that seem perpetually two years away. And while most legitimate efforts in this field - whet …Read the full story at The Verge.

One of the biggest downsides of renting is the relative inability to make modifications to your humble abode, and for tech enthusiasts, running Ethernet is just one of those things that is off the table unless you want an ugly cable running across the floors of many rooms in your house. In an apartment you're even more limited in what you're able to do.