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.

A few months back, Nvidia started making a bold claim. It said that DLSS 4 and its new transformer AI model provided better image quality than native resolution. The claim came up during the launch of the ill-fated RTX 5060, but it's a sentiment that's been floating in the air of the PC gaming ecosystem for years now. Sometimes, it's worth turning on DLSS because it looks better than running a game at native resolution, even if you don't need a performance uplift, or so the story goes.

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.

There's a special place in my heart for projects that transform simple kids' toys into something more complex, especially if they look cool in the process. It's always fascinating to watch someone grab a toy, open it up, see how it ticks, then work out ways to enhance it using more powerful hardware.

It’s wild to look back and realize just how many old games saw the future coming before the rest of us even knew what a memory card was. Now, I could name a lot of games that predicted the future vis-à-vis what the world would look like, what political tensions could lead to, and how industries would evolve, but some games predicted the future of gaming itself.

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.

Hopefully, by now, you've had some time to assess the damage the Steam Summer Sale has made to your wallet. Well, if you're still hungry for some deep discounts, Fanatical's latest build-your-own bundle may just be what you're looking for.

The X1 projecting a 90-inch image on an outdoor terrace over Starlink. I seldom sleep in the same place for more than a couple of weeks at a time, so I'm a big fan of portable all-in-one projectors. They're small and set up quickly, making them ideal for vanlife, gaming parties, outdoor movie nights, or an evening in on the couch - but they usually sacrifice quality for convenience. Anker's new Nebula X1 projector promises to produce an incredibly bright and color-accurate 4K image with excellent sound while remaining portable and quiet.Typically, if portability is at the top of your wish list, then sound and picture quality will suffer. Prioritize a cinematic experience and you're looking at an expensive, hu …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.

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.

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.

Google Chrome has been my primary browser for a long time, mainly because it's simple, fast, and works across all my devices. I like the huge library of extensions that it offers. Still, after spending more time with Microsoft Edge, I began to notice a few built-in features that actually make me question whether I should continue using Chrome.