Home Assistant Voice is a new must-have smart home accessory

Hello, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 65, your guide to the best and Virgo– the most things in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, get ready to take up all of your phone’s storage space, and you can also read all the old editions at Installer home page.)

This is the last one Installer of the year! I’m taking a couple of weeks off for the holidays, and I hope you’re relaxing too. Big thanks to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter, emailed me your tips, told me I’m a to-do list lunatic, and generally been a part of the Installerverse this year. year. Doing this newsletter is a lot of fun, and I’m so excited to do it with you. Bigger and better next year!

This week, I read about Spotify ghost artists and Formula 1 and Mufasa and the deeply stupid New York Jets, look at Hot Frosty (you can judge me, that’s okay) and watch it 30 Rock, beating Balatru for the first time, and trying to convince my child that actually it’s not fun and cool and great to wake up at 4am every day.

I also have for you a new smart home controller, a new app for the future of social networks, the next Sonic movie, and much more. Plus, our most requested homescreen… ever? Let’s do this.

(As always, the best part of Installer it’s your ideas and advice. What are you up to now? What should everyone else be playing/reading/watching/building/updating this holiday season? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might like it Installertell them subscribe here.)

• Home Assistant Voice. I am currently actively avoiding becoming a Home Assistant person, because I know I just had one Green in my house I will become a full-on smart home lunatic. But this new voice and microphone assistant – you can call it Jarvis! – attracted me more than ever. I could spend the holidays tearing up my house.
• Flipboard Surf. IFor two years, I’ve been raving about how the fediverse is the future, and Surf – a way to create and consume feeds of all kinds, from Mastodon and Bluesky to RSS and YouTube – is the best evidence I’ve seen. The waiting list for the app is small and it opens slowly, but you have to get on the list. Surfing is great.
• Google Whisk. Ready engineering was…never a good idea. Google is one of the companies trying to find better ways – in this case, he built a way to submit their models by simply uploading some inspo images and then describing what you want. I don’t know if it’s useful, per se, but it’s fun to play.
• Sonic The Hedgehog 3. I feel like no one ever talks about the Sonic movies? But I really enjoyed the first two, and the reviews on the latest installment are really strong. And apparently Jim Carrey is on a whole new level in this.
• acorn 8. Acorn is one of my favorite Mac apps. It’s like Photoshop for kids, in the sense that they can’t do everything, but they also don’t need a teacher to use it. The new version brings a bunch of automated editing and selection features, Shortcuts integration, and some other useful new stuff.
• Niagara Launcher. Niagara remains my favorite Android launcher, and I really like the new Usage Breaker feature that helps you track and manage your screen time. It’s much more subtle, and much more thoughtful, than all the OS-level stuff that Google and Apple do.
• 1-800-ChatGPT. A hotline to chat with AI is definitely to minimum half a gimmick but i kinda like it? (You can also message the number on WhatsApp.) There is a long and delicious history of mobile phone technology products like GOOG-411 and 777-FILM, and I’m glad it’s not over.
• The LG Signature OLED T. For our last Installer of the year, the most expensive thing we’ve ever discussed: a 77-inch, kinda-sorta transparent, Fish-looking TV which is extremely cool and totally unnecessary, and is now on sale for $59,999. If you buy one of these, please email me. I need to know everything

There’s a document I wrote when I was first planning Installer, in which I wrote a bunch of people who seemed like perfect people to feature in a home screen sharing section. Hank Green was the first name on this list. Hank is a YouTuber and a TikToker and an educator and a stand up comic and a philanthropist slash merchant and an author and just, like, everyone’s favorite person on the internet looks like? I can think of few people like that Installer like Hank.

And for this, the last issue of the year, Hank agreed to share his home screen! (He even gave me a story in the middle of our email exchange, which I’ll allow, because it was a very good story idea.) I was hoping he had 12 phones, each for a different social platform, but alas it seems it’s just that.

Here’s Hank’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The wallpaper: My son attacks me with a cat’s tail and the planet Mars.

Applications: Shopify, Wikipedia, YouTube, Duolingo, Apple Notes, Google Authenticator, Google, Philips Hue, FocusFriend, Gmail, Phone, Messages, Google Calendar.

I know it’s a mess. All of this has evolved over the years and now I just know where it all is and can never change anything. If there’s anything hot about this home screen, it’s that more people are using Wikipedia as a primary search engine – that’s often where you end up anyway, so I’m keeping this very useful. Also, I recently moved Twitter out of my social media folder to make it harder to use. It’s like three swipes away now, even though it’s still on my phone. I run several Shopify stores which are a big part of my business, so here it is!

By far the most used non-social media app on my phone is Notes. I trust it in a very unhealthy way which makes for an extremely fun scroll… for me at least. My short term memory isn’t what it used to be, so it all ends here. There is also a secret project here that could have been removed, but instead we’re doing a soft launch… you can probably spot it if you look hard enough.

I also asked Hank to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:

• Adrian Tchaikovsky. If you haven’t read it, read it Children of timebut if you only read the Children of time series you are missing so many very interesting ideas about what minds are and the strange and exciting future we are heading into.
• Bluesky. It’s where the nerds are, and so, five years from now, it’s where everyone will be.
• The Narwhal Wikipedia page has been robustly and entertainingly analyzed by this YouTube channel HG Modernismand I liked it so much and you’re a fool if you don’t watch it.
• Mindscape by Sean Carroll: : If you sometimes think: “I like Hank Green but it’s not technical enough and doesn’t take deep enough topics like the origin of life or consciousness”, BOY DO I HAVE A PODCAST FOR YOU!!
• First line: The PBS investigative documentary. It’s just extremely good and I feel like it’s totally underrated. Like, long YouTube videos that break things down are great, but you know what’s even better? When a large team of professionals work together on a long video analyzing things. The fact that I have more subscribers than First line on YouTube is FUCKED.

Here’s what Installer the community is in this week. I want to know what you are into now too! E-mail installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal – @davidpierce.11 ​​- with your tips for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more great tips, check out the answers to this post in Threads and this post on Bluesky.

“If you haven’t played with She is yet, I think it’s just about the most extravagant technology for personal knowledge management. It’s a next generation version of where knowledge graphs are going.” – Robert

“Probably one show that’s a little bit under the radar right now is the show The Agency. Cast stars like Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, and Richard Gere. This is a show that asks a lot from the viewer, but it is well rewarded.” – John

“Planning to build my second Classic-TKL keyboard from NovelKeys during the holidays. The real challenge will be figuring out which keystrokes to put on it! – Noah

“The ABC procedure High Potential it scratched the itch I’ve had since shows with similar concepts like Monk, Psych, or Mentalist aired. Is it revolutionary… no. But if you love “person with special talent solves crimes”, this is a show for you. – Mike

“I’ve tried all these Bluesky/fediverse clients. I like: OpenVibe, Graysky and Skeets.” – Jordan

“One of the best AI shows I’ve seen this past year, PantheonIt’s on Netflix instead of AMC Plus. Highly recommended! ” – Saad

“It’s not going to spread Christmas cheer, but tonight I went to a theater near me to see The Order. It’s a pretty limited theatrical release (and on Prime Video in the rest of the world) but the movie is fantastic. It is based on real life events involving a (more) violent group of the Aryan Nation in the Pacific North. It’s violent, it’s scary, it’s full of slurs and police clichés but it really happened.” – John

“I’m very late to the party but I really like it Suika Game for the Switch. A nice change of pace compared to what I usually play and today I managed to get my first watermelon.” – Filippo

“I read it before, but I never finished the series, so I picked up the first one in the Murderbot Diaries series and I really like it (again). ” – Dan

“Reading The Backgrounds by Nicholas Carr. It’s a very serious read about our relationship with the internet, written in a way that cuts through the entire history of humans’ relationship with technology, literacy and information intake.” —Jou

“This again Superman trailers!“- Nacho

One of my very favorite types of stories is how things beget other things in ways no one could see coming. Someone invented the elevatorand so the skyscrapers happened, and the cities changed forever. Some lobbyists come up with the term “riding“, and suddenly the cars dominate the road. Or what I discovered this week: how the invention of the gang-nail plate somewhat unintentionally it forever changed the homes people live in. Without a strange metal sheet, we cannot have open plans. strange I like it. I bet there are a million more examples like this. It blows my mind every time.

Have a great party, see you in a few weeks!