Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 108, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, hope your holiday shopping is going well, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Ariana Grande and pelvic floors and Josh Shapiro and Las Vegas, finishing and then immediately rewatching The Chair Company, working by the light of this extremely rad MoMA lamp, installing a bunch of Hue Dimmer Switches around my house, trying desperately to hide the giant box that came with my new Frame TV, wondering if my 12,983 minutes of Spotify time this year …Read the full story at The Verge.

Ever since Valve officially announced the Steam Machine, the gaming scene has been awash with discourse over its design. The first port of call was the price, which people speculated would be set at a loss for Valve, given how the company makes so much money from software sales. However, Valve then confirmed that the Steam Machine would not be subsidized, which means it'll likely be priced like a mini PC instead of a console.

Call me an old-timer, but I personally prefer my Windows apps to be, you know...Windows apps. Unfortunately for me, Microsoft has been trying to add web apps that look like Windows apps instead. For a while, the Copilot app was a web app until Microsoft made it native.

If you've even dipped a toe within the Microsoft ecosystem recently, you'll already know that it's currently full of AI tools. It's not just Windows 11, either; everything from Microsoft 365 to the Game Bar has gotten a dash of Copilot. But as eager as the Redmond giant is to get everything using AI tools, some people don't want to do that, even if Microsoft cannot possibly fathom why.

There is no end to the number of to-do list and task management apps available across the web. Todoist, Asana, Zoho — the list goes on and on. As powerful as those applications are, their best features are locked behind paywalls, and you don't have as much control over their privacy as you might with something else. Tududi offers a fully self-hosted, totally free alternative that outstrips anything third-party apps have to offer in a lot of different ways. It's self-hosted, so the initial setup can be slightly confusing, but it's one of the easiest applications to get up and running that I've worked with.

Eleven years ago, I played Alien: Isolation for the first time. It was my very first introduction to the Alien IP, and I was taken aback by everything about the game. The visuals, the atmosphere, and the dread it instilled in me. I remember being stuck in a single hallway for three hours over the course of two days, simply because the Xenomorph terrified me so.

If you want to supercharge your productivity on Windows, PowerToys is one of the tools you should install on your PC. It can help you with a broad range of productivity tasks, because it has multiple different modules, each designed for a specific task. Command Palette (CmdPal) is one of them, and a lot of exciting things are happening around it.

I've been collecting links in Raindrop.io for years, treating it like a utilitarian bookmark manager — folders for articles, tags for organization, the usual setup. Then, one day, I switched to grid view while organizing design references, and everything changed. Suddenly, Raindrop wasn't just storing my links. It was showing them. Web card previews turned a boring list into a visual canvas, and I realized I'd been sleeping on one of the best mood-boarding tools hiding in plain sight.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on how to work anywhere, follow Thomas Ricker. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedI've worked from home for 20 years. In that time, I've seen technologies supporting remote work advance considerably. But nothing has been as transformative as the arrival of Starlink, SpaceX's internet service that lets me "work from home" anywhere I choose, be it from the open road, forest, or desolate beach.SpaceX began launching Starlink satellites in 2019 to provide data in the l …Read the full story at The Verge.

Windows 10 has now officially reached the end of its lifespan, except for Microsoft's extensions and various other tweaks. That said, many people are still using the operating system; some (myself included) don't want to upgrade a processor or be forced to a new OS, while others have mission-critical software that doesn't work with Windows 11. If you're holding back because of hardware restrictions, there's a good chance your computer is a bit on the older side.

Thermal throttling is one of those problems most of us keep hearing about long before we actually experience it. I remember seeing the term thrown around constantly in various Reddit posts when I looked up performance tweaks in my early years of PC gaming. The way people talked about it made me think thermal throttling kicked in the moment a component hit a specific temperature and instantly cut my performance in half. That idea stuck with me for years, even though modern CPUs and GPUs don't necessarily work like that.

We all love a good PC upgrade, whether it’s a faster GPU, more RAM, or even a better cooling unit for the CPU. While these upgrades are usually straightforward, there are often factors to consider when swapping out a part and/or adding a new one. An oversight in this department can potentially mean instability, not unlocking full performance, or even worse performance than before the upgrade.