Image: David Pierce / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 47, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about Skibidi Toilet and the future of mall brands and the legacy of Bell Labs, watching Dirty Pop and catching up on Cobra Kai, downloading every single podcast episode mentioned in this excellent Reddit thread, writing stuff down with Napkin, and trying desperately to figure out what I forgot to pack for vacation. I’ve also been trying new blueberry muffin recipes all week — thanks to everyone who sent me one! Speaking of which: As I mentioned last week, Installer is taking a summer... Continue reading…

There’s a bit of soldering involved with the mod, so Voultar will initially be only selling an installation service. | Screenshot: Macho Nacho Productions Nintendo sold over 49 million Super Nintendo consoles, but not all of them were created equal. A later hardware revision improved the quality of the SNES’s video output, and over three decades later, one modder has come up with a way to bring those same improvements to nearly every Super Nintendo ever released.Zach Henson, a console modder who also goes by the name Voultar, has created a DIY modification kit for older Super Nintendo consoles called the Edge Enhancer. Expected to sell for around $60, the mod kit upgrades the console’s video output, making graphics appear much sharper and colors more saturated.Although Nintendo made many revisions to the Super Nintendo’s hardware during the console’s production run, for retro gamers,... Continue reading…

Did I mention it’s only $56?! It doesn’t do anything other than track steps, but that’s all I want it to do. And at this price? I ain’t complaining. Continue reading…

The Frame can easily pass for a traditional picture frame, which is part of its charm. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge If you want to help the student in your life feel a little more at home this school year, Samsung’s Music Frame is a unique piece of dorm decor that’ll do just the trick. And right now, the art-inspired smart speaker is down to $347.99 ($52 off) at Amazon, which matches the all-time low we last saw during Amazon Prime Day.Samsung’s Music Frame is a lot of things. As the name implies, it’s a mountable 12.9 x 12.9-inch picture frame you can hang on your wall or rest on the included display stand. However, unlike the larger Sonos / Ikea Symfonisk frame speaker, you can customize Samsung’s speaker with physical photographs of, say, loved ones back home. You can even get creative and swap it out with physical art prints if you feel so... Continue reading…

Image: Apple Apple’s iOS 18.1 developer preview comes with an AI-powered feature that lets you record and transcribe phone calls, as reported by MacRumors. Users with access to the beta can tap the new “record” button in the top-left corner of the call screen to keep an audio log of their call.Once enabled, all callers will hear a message saying, “This call will be recorded.” The Phone app will then record the call, while automatically creating a transcription that will appear in the Notes app. In addition, users will also be able to access the full audio recording and an AI-generated summary of the call in the Notes app.Apple first showed off phone call recording during its Worldwide Developers Conference in June. The feature seems useful for... Continue reading…

The smaller sibling to UE’s Epicboom offers plenty of punch for its size. But it’s a little thin on features to justify $250. Continue reading…

Image: MysteryLupin (X) Google appears to be preparing to launch a fourth generation Nest Learning Thermostat. Details on the thermostat first leaked last week, and now the same leaker has posted more documents on X that show this new model will have a customizable home screen, a new “Dynamic Farsight” feature, and a “borderless” display.The leaks detail a “high-res borderless display” which looks like it will allow the UI of the Nest Learning Thermostat to extend into the area that was typically a black bezel on existing third generation units. Other leaked images show UI elements that appear much closer to the bezels of the display, too. Image: MysteryLupin (X) The leaked specs of the fourth generation Nest Learning Thermostat. D... Continue reading…

SSDs are pretty reliable, especially when compared to a spinning HDD, but they still have a finite number of rewrites they can withstand before they start to fail. This is on a cell-by-cell level, not necessarily the entire drive getting bricked after a while. SSDs store data in different ways with several different options: Single-Level Cell (SLC) or Multi-Level Cell (MLC), which can be broken down into Triple-Level Cell (TLC), and Quad-Level Cell (QLC). SLC is known to be the most durable, but also the most expensive, while QLC offers tons of storage with slightly less durability.

Out of the box, when you connect a device to your home network with either Wi-Fi or Ethernet, its assigned an IP address automatically. This system is ideal for most people, since it simplifies the connection process and generally works just fine with the services they use. If youre more interested in local networking, however, needing to look up an IP address before making a connection could make it more of a pain than its worth. While some people dont need static IPs at all, there are still several reasons someone setting up a local network should set dedicated IPs for at least some of their devices.

Over the years, many note-taking tools such as Bear, Obsidian, Roam Research, and more have adopted Markdown formatting by default. Among them, Obsidian stands out for several reasons, such as a clean UI, robust plugin store, rich theming engine, graph view, backlinks, and more.

Image: Samar Haddad for The Verge It’s one of the most common low-stakes annoyances in modern life: you flop down on the couch at the end of the day, finally with a few minutes to watch one of the dozens of incredible shows or movies you have access to thanks to the peak TV era and the advent of streaming, and you start scrolling. Instead of actually watching anything, you spend an interminable evening opening apps, aimlessly scrolling through endless rows of same-looking tiles. You eventually give up and watch The Office again.On this episode of The Vergecast, we look at why TV and movie recommendations are so complicated, and whether AI might be able to make them better. If Spotify can build infinite playlists of music you’ll like, and YouTube and TikTok always seem... Continue reading…

You may have seen detectives in movies using IP addresses to track down bad guys, but in real life, its not that straightforward. While an IP (Internet Protocol) address is given to your connected devices, you may very well have a different IP address than you did just a couple of hours ago. Also, if youve ever tried to connect to your home network from another connection using your IP address, you might find that its not even your current one anymore.