Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 106, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, Happy Thanksgiving Week, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about prediction markets and Hilary Duff and Matt Belloni and yeast, clearing space for a Steam Machine, playing News Tower thanks to Stephen Totilo's recommendation, checking to make sure I remember all the Wicked lyrics (I do, don't worry) before seeing For Good, giving up on my fantasy football team, and recording season two of Version History. It's a fun one.I also have for you a ne …Read the full story at The Verge.

The current discount takes nearly $200 off the original list price. More than five years after making their debut, Sony’s WH-1000XM4 remain an excellent pair of noise-canceling headphones. And right now, Best Buy is offering a doorbuster deal that drops them to just $159.99 ($190 off) for a limited time, which is the lowest price we’ve seen this year. If you prefer the latest tech, you can also snag the newer XM6 for about $398 ($60 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target.Sony WH-1000XM4Where to Buy: $349.99 $159.99 at Best Buy $349.99 $189.99 at Sony $349.99 $348 at WalmartWe once considered the XM4 to be the best headphones you could buy. We replaced them with the XM5, followed by the XM6 three years later, but the last-last-gen model is still a solid pick in 2025. The XM4 offer great sound quality, up to 30 hours of battery life, and terrific active noise cancellation, even if the ANC can’t quite compete with Sony’s newer models. They support multipoint connectivity, allowing you to pair them with two devices simultaneously, along with great voice call performance. They also feature a handy Speak to Chat feature, which can automatically pause your audio when you start speaking.Additionally, the XM4 support wear detection, meaning they will automatically pause whatever is playing when you remove them from your head and resume playback when you put them back on. And unlike the last-gen XM5, the comfortable headphones fold when not in use, making it relatively easy to slide them into your bag.As for what you miss out on by opting for the XM4 over the XM6, Sony’s latest model offers improved sound quality, more powerful ANC, and even clearer voice calls. You can also charge the XM6 while listening to them, though you’ll need to juggle two cables — a USB-C and a 3.5mm — since they don’t support audio over USB-C.Read our full WH-1000XM4 review.

Solid-state drives have become the default storage choice for modern PCs for their lightning-fast performance, but despite their speed and resilience, they're not invincible. Even the most reliable SSDs still rely on delicate flash memory cells that gradually wear out with use, making longevity a real concern for anyone running read and write intensive software.

When I report on gamers noticing an increase in their system's performance, it's usually because a new piece of tech has arrived that lets them render their games better. However, this time around, things are a little different. The latest Nvidia hotfix driver has improved people's in-game performance by up to 65%, but I wouldn't say it was an FPS boost, per se. In fact, it'd probably be more accurate to call it an FPS "reclamation," weirdly enough.

Man, I clocked a lot of hours into Dawn of War. I think the game is the reason why I collect Warhammer miniatures to this day. It had a real knack for bringing those gray, plastic soldiers to life, where they can scrap with one another and give us glimpses into how they operate. I always played as the Orks. They're definitely the most fun.

You can have a monitor with excellent picture quality and still be completely underwhelmed the moment you start gaming on it. I've used 1440p and 4K monitors that looked great for watching movies, using productivity apps, and web browsing, but their weaknesses became hard to ignore whenever I played fast-paced games. That's when I realized high resolution and punchy colors don't mean much when the panel can't keep up with your gameplay in real time.

If you've ever used your TV as a computer monitor, you know that it's not the best idea in the world. The optimization that's done to the panel for TVs compared to that for close-use monitors often means hard-to-read text, and that's before considering how large the average smart TV is these days. Plus, you're usually limited to HDMI, with USB-C or DisplayPort often absent.

What are thooooose? Well, they're my Vines, the six-second videos that helped mint a generation of famous comedians and also kicked off the era of endlessly looping vertical video that has consumed us all ever since. If you weren't there at the time, most Vines might seem utterly nonsensical. But if you were on the internet when Vine burned brightest - a much briefer moment than you might remember - you probably still find yourself saying "look at all those chickens" more often than you should. For this episode of Version History, we tell the story of Vine from beginning to end. It takes longer than six seconds… but not that much longer. …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you run a home server, you inevitably fall into one of two camps. You're either like me, falling squarely in the set and forget it category, where you install and then never get around to managing updates. And then there's the crowd that will install a dedicated app like Watchtower, giving it permissions to restart anything it wants and hoping that a breaking change doesn't bring down your entire home server overnight. This group generally tends to avoid automation. Understandably so. Things break. Moreover, we like the idea of manually checking GitHub releases, checking for update logs, pulling images one by one, and restarting containers only when we're sure that nothing is about to stop working.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on streaming competition, follow Andrew Webster. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedIn 2022, Apple won an Oscar. The company behind the Mac and iPhone made a splash by winning Best Picture with the indie darling CODA, a remake of a French-Belgian film about the only hearing member of a family with a struggling fishing business. It was created with a modest budget reported around $10 million, and yet despite its relatively humble beginnings, for a time the movie was …Read the full story at The Verge.

NotebookLM is really powerful on its own, but pairing it with your productivity apps makes it even more useful, in my opinion. I even use it alongside my graphics apps to boost my design skills. So lately, I started using it with one of my top note-taking apps, Joplin. It’s a weirdly solid combo, even though these two apps are from completely different planets and don’t have any official integrations.

Ever since I got into Linux six months ago, I've fallen in love with KDE Plasma. I've added it to pretty much every distro I've tried: Fedora with Plasma, EndeavourOS with Plasma (a default, but still), Arch Linux with Plasma, and one time, just the plain KDE Plasma OS. For me, KDE Plasma is the BBQ sauce of Linux desktop environments: you can slap it on anything and it'll taste great.