How the Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 replaced my AirPods

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 50, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re fresh here, welcome, I promise it’s not always this many costly gadgets, and besides you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been reading about crime rings and paleontology beefs and the unusual language of TikTok, watching Kevin Can F**k Himself and Trap, re-upping my Yousician subscription to get back into the guitar, doing quite a few weird stretches after spraining my finger, and trying to make the celebrated Levain cookies.

I besides have for you a bunch of fresh wearable gadgets, a fresh Star Wars game, the return of a fabulous YouTube series, and much more.

Also, I inactive want to know: who’s your favourite lesser-known creator? I’ve gotten so many large answers so far, but I want to do it truly large next week with lots of large people to check out. So keep your favorites coming!

All right, large gadget-y week this week. Let’s dig in.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be playing, reading, watching, eating, downloading, buying, or making out of wood? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know individual else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)

• The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2. I’ve had these for a week and they’re easy 1 of my favourite gadget upgrades of the year so far. For day-to-day dog-walking and grocery-running and exercising headphones, I’ve been totally converted to bone conduction over the course of this year. These fresh ones have more bass, mercifully non-awful mics, longer battery, USB-C — I genuinely love them so far.
• Star Wars Outlaws. I have been burned by so many Star Wars games before, but this 1 sounds… well, if not like the most innovative game in history, at least like a seriously good time. And as individual who doesn’t love an endless open-world game, the slightly more rigid structure sounds perfect for me to dive into.
• BeRreal Roulette. Are people inactive utilizing BeReal? I honestly don’t know. But I love this idea: it’s the regular BeReal experience, but it grabs a shot from your camera rotation and lets you respond to it as you share it. So clever, so very dangerous.
• The Dyson Airwrap i.d. Look, I don’t have adequate hair to say whether Bluetooth connectivity for “personalized curling routines” is anything, but I do know that all single individual I know with an Airwrap loves the thing to bits and will most likely like the fresh attachments.
• “I feel as stupid as I look – superb Labs Frame.” There’s actually quite a few cool stuff in these AR glasses, at least from a hardware perspective. But as Linus and the Short Circuit folks find, the AI just ain’t ready. I got way besides many Rabbit and Humane vibes from this video.
• The Garmin Fenix 8. Garmin’s ultrapremium smartwatches now come with OLED screens, a mic and a speaker, and any nifty messaging features. These are priced For Serious Outdoorspeople Only, but they’re beautiful compelling — and a month-plus of battery life just straight-up rules.
• Anthropic Artifacts. As chatbots go, this is the coolest UI anyone has built yet. You can usage Claude to build something and actually see it work and change in real time next to the chat; it makes the process of making things much more collaborative and useful.
• The Plaud NotePin. Another day, another AI voice recorder thing. I inactive have no thought if these will always be actually useful to most people, but I’ve been investigating this $169 1 for a fewer days, and it’s beautiful good at transcribing and summarizing whatever nonsense I say into it all day. (And speaking of AI notes: Cleft Notes, 1 of my favorites, officially launched on iOS this week.)
• “The Sustained Two-Shot.” I mentioned my love for Every Frame a Painting a fewer weeks ago, and now they’re back! I get the sense this next series is going to be very meta since the EFAP duo is making their own film, and I’m highly here for it.

We made it to Installer 50! The first anniversary of Installer was 2 weeks ago, a fact I missed entirely. Thank you so much to everyone who has signed up, clicked links, sent me recommendations, yelled at me about typos and formatting, and made life in the Installerverse incredibly fun over the last year (and 2 weeks). I have large plans for year 2 and hopefully lots and lots of fun stuff to share.

My plan has always been to share my own setup in this space all 25 issues, which works out to about all six months. It’s a good chance to take stock of my own setup and systems, but besides to share what I’m learning and discovering as Installer’s Downloader-in-Chief. (Here’s my erstwhile setup, from Installer #25.)

So here’s my homescreen as it is right now, plus any info on the apps I’m utilizing and why:

The phone: iPhone 15 Pro, with a screen increasingly scratched to bits and that will hopefully be replaced — either by an iPhone 16 or a Pixel 9, depending on how the next fewer weeks go — this fall.

The wallpaper: Still my wife and boy on the lockscreen, but a fresh image of the small dude on the homescreen. I’ve been moving the iOS 18 beta all summer, which means I’m yet free from the stupid app grid, which made lots of fresh photos into plausible options. This one’s my fave.

The apps: Readwise Reader, Kindle, Maps, Day One, Spotify, Phone, Pocket Casts, Camera, Messages, Fantastical, Capacities, Arc.

I have become a customized icon convert, and there’s just no going back. This pack is the Vera Icon Pack from Vuk Andric, which I bought for $4 and like very much. Dark icons are the best icons.

My most-used apps haven’t truly changed since last time, but I have less of them on the screen now.

• I’m in the midst of my longest journaling streak of all time in Day One, and it’s entirely due to the fact that I changed the regular prompt to “what did you do today?” which feels so much lower-stakes than most journaling that I find myself doing it much more happily.
• I am desperately trying to quit Spotify, which has gotten bloated and costly and just worse over time. I don’t know where to go yet… but I’m working on that.
• The Calendar widget is from Apple Calendar due to the fact that all the another calendar apps I tried required me to open them besides frequently just to refresh the widget. This one’s not beautiful, but it’s at least up to date.
• The “Comms” and “Content” folders are working truly well for me. Any kind of communication: Comms! (Comms is besides the only folder allowed to have badges or notifications.) All my news / games / endless scrolling apps go in Content. I usage Spotlight search for everything else.
• I’m like 2 weeks into investigating Capacities for all my notes and projects, and so far, my review is “it’s Notion but uglier but way faster.” I’m into it so far.

I share all week what I’m into right now, but here are a fewer I don’t think I’ve mentioned here late that I highly recommend:

• I love Tom Wolfe’s writing but someway had never read The Right Stuff before. Good lord is this book great. (It’s about astronauts and fighter pilots and what it takes to decide to hazard your life for the skies.) Apparently, any of the details are, ahem, somewhat overdone, but even if it’s pure fiction, it’s inactive a heck of a story.
• I started watching Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE more or little by accident, walking into the area right after my wife started it. But this K-pop competition show, which turns out to actually be about fandom and fame and the net and in places gets profoundly bleak and hard to watch, hooked me immediately, and I’ve been reasoning about it nonstop all week.
• I utilized to play quite a few Retro Bowl — most likely besides much Retro Bowl — on my phone. Now I’m trying to do little of everything on my phone, so I dropped $5 on the control version of the game. Bigger screen, better controls, same absurdly fun game. No notes.

Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email [email protected] or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature any of our favorites here all week. For even more large recommendations than I could fit here, check out the replies to this post on Threads.

“As a fellow nerd who keeps dreaming of the perfect note-taking setup, I can’t believe I’ve never seen anyone urge Emacs to you, and especially the built-in Org-mode. It’s endlessly customizable, it’s super flexible, and especially erstwhile you compose anything for a surviving (articles, scripts, emails, code), it’s by far the best tool I have found out there. Beorg is simply a truly good iOS app that supports it besides (and a decent if plain note-taking app in general), and on Android, I usage Orgzly instead.” — David

“Match Land. I’ve been looking for games to play mindlessly while listening to music, and this game has gotten me hooked. This game uses the match-3 mechanic as a way to stack up harm for an incredibly addictive RPG that’s all about combos. And it’s got cute 8-bit graphics to boot!” — Shani

“Been playing quite a few Deadlock! It’s Valve’s MOBA / third-person hero shooter hybrid that someway just works. It’s in an early playtest state on Steam — and does have quite a few performance / gameplay rough edges, along with a agenda for erstwhile the game actually *lets* you play online. Doesn’t halt it from being fun, though, and I love Bebop now, so it’s worth it.” — Arthur

“Somehow Ryan George made

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the perfect comedy skit

“I late accomplished something truly the Vergiest thing always (and possibly a small crazy): merging the Mac and Samsung ecosystems! Here’s the breakdown. NearDrop is AirDrop, but for Android and Mac. It even works both ways (with a small trick to initiate transfers from Mac to Android by mimicking sharing a file from another Android telephone to make it visible to the Mac). Parallels lets me run Windows on my Mac, and Phone Link provides seamless copy-paste between devices. I can even cast multiple apps from my telephone / tablet to the Mac’s screen with drag-and-drop support! Mirrcast on Tab S9: Turns my tablet into a second display for the Mac AND routes audio through my Buds 3 Pro. The perfect seamless car audio switching between the Mac and my Phone!” — Khalil

“I’m loving Terminus on my Steam Deck. Turn-based zombie endurance game that just released out of Early Access.” – Justin

“I found this podcast’s position on generative AI from Australian musician Ben Lee to be refreshingly different to the usual concerns about licensing or quality.” — Andrew

“I’ve been listening to Darknet Diaries, by Jack Rhysider. This is simply a podcast about hackers, breaches, shadow government activity, hacktivism, cybercrime, and all the things that dwell on the hidden parts of the network. It besides involves physical penetration testing, social engineering, and hardware hacking for fun.” — Sinan

“For people who have time and are wanting to tidy up their individual file organization, I would powerfully urge Johnny.Decimal. It’s a truly intuitive (to me, at least) way of keeping files organized, and he’s just launched a fast start pack to aid people get into the system. Also, his website is beautiful cool.” — Nathan

“I cannot urge the latest Waveform episode enough, 1 of the best explainers for the concept of the fediverse and its protocols.” — Filip

First of all, thanks to everyone who said you’d be down for Installer Fantasy Football next year. I’m in! Let’s do it — it’ll be bonkers. Time to start prepping.

Second of all, a peculiar shoutout to Jim, who sent me an email about their fantasy setup that absolutely filled me with joy. Here it is due to the fact that this is how it’s done:

“It’s far from perfect, and I’m not certain it saves me any time. However, it’s well organized, and I’ve learned a lot along the way. All of the data is contained in Google Sheets. I usage App Scripts to import all of the data:

• I usage APIs to import my various fantasy teams from Yahoo, Sleeper, and ESPN. This gives me access to rosters, transactions, standings and free agents/waivers
• I scrape data from various websites (FantasyPros, Ourlads, Pro Football Reference) straight via Apps Scripts
• Some site are a bit besides complicated to navigate for Apps Scripts, so I usage Python to scrape those and make a CSV which I import to Google Sheets
• Lastly, I usage various R libraries (nflreadr, nflfastr, ffanalytics, ffscrapr) to download and manipulate the ridiculous amount of data that they make available. I export those to CSV as well and import to Google Sheets

It’s a complicated process, but I usage MacOS Automator and Google Apps Script Triggers to automate most of it. It only requires a couple of weekly mouse clicks to update all of the data.”

You are all my people. This rules.