is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired. Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 79, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, RIP your free time, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) I also have for you the game that will both improve and take over your life, a new season of a favorite show, an AirTag competitor worth checking out, a fun new organizer for your desk, and much more. We were off last week, and I missed you all terribly. Let’s get back into it. (As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be playing / watching / baking / eating / listening to / downloading this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.) The Drop Screen share I want to do something slightly different here in this space this week: I want to talk about wallpapers. For years, I’ve cared a lot about my wallpaper. Sometimes it’s a photo of a place I love, sometimes it’s a shot of my family, sometimes that all just looks kind of aesthetically busy and I go for something minimalist. I find a lot of wallpapers just by Googling words, but in case you’re curious, here are a few sources of stuff I’ve liked over the years: I should say two things about all this. One, the wallpaper world has long been a mess when it comes to ownership and copyright — people just share these things willy-nilly. And two, there is a lot of generative AI at work in the wallpaper game right now. I always try to track down wallpapers I find (a reverse image search on Google often does the trick), but it’s messy. Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because I had a conversation with Casey Johnston from She’s a Beast the other day (coming soon to The Vergecast!), and she made a surprisingly compelling case that actually, wallpapers are bad. She argued that you don’t want your lockscreen and homescreen to be peaceful or exciting or enticing — they should be ignored as much as possible, because you should either get to what you’re doing or get off your phone. This strikes me as a very good argument! I’ve had an all-black wallpaper going ever since we chatted, and, well, I don’t know how I feel about it. I certainly don’t like looking at it as much as I used to. So here’s what I’m wondering: what’s your wallpaper strategy? Have you had the same one forever? Do you rotate daily? Hourly? Where do you find stuff? I want to hear all about it — and also, I want to start sharing more of your homescreens in this space, too. So if you have a good one, send it my way. And we’ll be back to our regular programming next week. Crowdsourced Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky. “I found a couple of tools that may or may not have been called out already that help with managing tabs. One is a free Chrome extension called Session Buddy. This one is great because it also lets you export tabs in Markdown. Perfect for moving things to Obsidian or other Markdown editors. The other is Collections in Microsoft Edge. It’s like Bookmarks but better. I can add notes to each collection and really just dump links in there as I move along, gathering literature and other stuff for research. I just hope they keep this feature around and keep updating it.” — John “The BBC show Ludwig. It’s a great murder of the week show with an intriguing overarching mystery, and I believe its series one finale is being released in the US on Britbox today.” — Jack “I recently rediscovered this site called OC Remix. It’s a site dedicated entirely to fan-made remixes of video game music, including individual songs and entire community created albums.” — Nick “I’ve been rooting my Kindles and putting KOReader on all of them. Also trying out Wallabag as a read-later solution since it can be self hosted and also works on my rooted Kindle.” — Christoph “Andor season two is coming next week and I have been rewatching season one, it’s so well made. Easily one of the best shows of the last couple of years. I recommend it to everyone, even if they are not Star Wars fans.” — Tirth “SuprOrdinary. Just came across this small new YouTube channel from an ex-Apple, Google, Nike graphics designer. His ‘first’ video, about doing free graphics design work for a local sandwich shop, really hits the spot with its unique combination of editing, camera work and the life lesson theme about change that’s present throughout the video.” — Teo “Came across yet another note taking app, Antinote. But this one is different: it’s Mac only, which means no syncing, but it’s a great place to jot down quick notes from meetings. It has simple swipe gestures to go from note to note, built in math, a timer — a bunch of things for ideas and text that is just temporary. Love it.” — Eddy “Watching MobLand on Paramount Plus, and for an Irish man Pierce Brosnan’s Irish accent is every bit as bad as Tom Cruise’s Irish accent in Far and Away (I’m an Irish man).” — Kenny “I’ve been playing Ouros, a relaxing and colorful puzzle game about Bézier curves. Well worth the purchase price.” — Daniel Signing off Runna is one of those apps that just keeps appearing in my inbox. I know a lot of folks like using it over other running apps, because its training plans and interface are so good. Runna was acquired by Strava this week, and while I know there are also a lot of Strava fans out there in the Installerverse, I’ve been wondering: is this good news? Sometimes these acquisitions are like, oh cool, new features and better reliability! Other times they’re like, oh no, my app is dead, RIP my app. So I’m curious, Runna users: how’re you feeling about this? And if you’re jumping ship, where are you headed? Personally, I’m still over here staring at Fantasy Hike all day. My progress is slow, but gosh the app is nice. See you next week!