Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 90, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, hope you're staying cool, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I have been watching The Bear's fourth season, preparing for the deluge of Qi2.2 wireless chargers, pondering how I'll use the upcoming Bigfoot emoji to troll my group chats, studying the relaunched EmojiTracker, reading this giant profile of NBA star Joel Embiid, enjoying Pixar's Hoppers teaser trailer way more than I expected, learning who Alex Warren is, and wondering if I should actually watch all of S …Read the full story at The Verge.

I know enough about networking to know that there's a ton I don't know, understand, or possibly never will. But that hasn't stopped me from building a (fairly) smart home, with VLANs to make it more manageable, and a robust cybersecurity solution to keep my privacy—well—private. I might have been late to the party on a few nifty networking features, but I got there eventually, and I don't want you to go through the same hoops of trial and error.

Intel is a newcomer to the discrete GPU game. The Arc B570 is a Battlemage graphics card and was released late 2024, taking on AMD and Nvidia in the low-end segment. This GPU offers butter-smooth 1080p gaming and can even handle 1440p gaming with settings conservatively configured. What makes the B570 particularly noteworthy is its impressive support for AV1 transcoding, following the first-gen A series cards. This makes the GPU great for gaming and transcoding through Jellyfin.

What you consider beautiful is very subjective, so you might not agree with my observations about BlueStar. After all, Linux users haven’t traditionally been exposed to beautiful interfaces. Linux distributions range from command-line-only setups to functioning works of art.

With many creative users considering a step away from Adobe products, it can feel overwhelming to decide which creative software to use next. There are many reasons people might avoid Adobe, but price is typically at the top of the list, along with concerns about too many AI features or privacy issues, among others. I’ve extensively reviewed many Adobe alternatives, from paid tools to ad-based options and open-source projects, but there are some that I just don’t think are worth using just in a bid to avoid Adobe products.

Alexa Plus’s AI agent can navigate websites and book things for you, but it needs to verify its dates. One of the best features of Amazon's new Alexa Plus is that I don't have to "speak Alexa" anymore. I've been testing the voice assistant for about a week now, and it understands what I say, regardless of how I say it - there's no more need for precise phrasing to get Alexa to do what I want. This big shift underpins another headline feature of the revamped generative AI-powered assistant that I've been testing: agentic AI. But this one needs work. The idea is I can talk to Alexa Plus as I would to a real personal assistant and ask it to do tasks, such as reserving a restaurant for my friend's birthday, finding an electrician to fix my brok …Read the full story at The Verge.

Obsidian isn't the first app that comes to mind for the Steam Deck. The independent note-taking app is undoubtedly one of the most powerful productivity tools around, but it's not exactly designed for use on a handheld like the Steam Deck. But, if you're a madman like me, you can install Obsidian on the Steam Deck and sync your notes.

On Thursday night, I toggled endlessly between a TikTok Live stream and a shopping app in anticipation of 9:30PM. For 30 minutes, I hunted for an available listing; many expletives were uttered. I exhibited bot behavior and got iced out of the app multiple times. I tapped so many times my thumbs got sore. This is Labubu drop night.Something that's lost in the Labubu mania is that actually buying one from the source is, in one word, maddening. There are, of course, countless fake options ("Lafufus") that some collectors have come to embrace. But if you want a guaranteed real one, you have to go to the source. Pop Mart, the Chinese toy compa …Read the full story at The Verge.

Alligator Alcatraz, Florida's hastily built, $225 million-and-counting immigrant detention facility in the Everglades, is both a de facto concentration camp and a right-wing meme. President Donald Trump's most ardent supporters are willing to excuse - or are in some cases reveling in - allegations of inhumane treatment at the facility: worms in food, floors flooded with fecal water, fluorescent lights left on for 24 hours a day, and no air conditioning at night despite South Florida's relentless humidity. To them, the whole thing is a big joke, fodder for memes that activate the base even as they turn the majority of Americans off from Tru …Read the full story at The Verge.

For years, Adobe comprised the majority of my creative world. Most of the tutorials I watched revolved around Adobe software when I first got into editing, and naturally, everything else followed suit. Most of the templates I downloaded were made by or for Adobe software. I memorized the shortcuts and got used to the layouts and features.

Before I picked the 8-core Ryzen 7 5700X for my current build, I had never used any CPU with more than 6 cores. And after three years, I can confidently say that wasting money on an 8-core chip was an impulsive, expensive mistake. Not only did I gain nothing in gaming performance, but I also reduced my budget for the rest of the build, which could have been spent on a better CPU cooler, a second SSD, or even a slightly beefier PSU. I've learned my lesson, and I'm limiting myself to 6-core CPUs for my next PC.

There are a bunch of knowledge management tools out there. Each promises to be the ultimate solution. From outlining tools and rich databases to traditional note-taking apps, I have bounced between them all. However, I couldn’t find a system that could keep pace with my thoughts or understanding. That was until I discovered Hypernotes.