Author: News Room

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 139, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, barbecue sauce, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I’ve been reading about Johnny Knoxville and Google Zero and the history of the bicycle, @all-ing everyone in all my WhatsApp chats just because I can now, rereading There Will Come Soft Rains because this week is when it happens, seeing if Sabbath can help fix my screentime problems, once again moving everything around in my home office, eating altogether too…

I’m a cynic when it comes to special editions. Hey, folks! Buy this thing you already own, but in a new colour! Just no. But also, I am weak. So when the chance arose to pit remakes of two 8-bit classics against each other, how could I refuse? Besides, this was a chance to settle that decades-old argument once and for all: which really is better, the ZX Spectrum or the Commodore 64? (I’m 100% certain there’s no way picking a favourite here will cause me any trouble among fans of either system!) Back in black I started with TheC64 Mini Black. Unlike previous…

There’s two things you should know about me, your intrepid reviewer: I hate the feature creep associated with modern power banks, and I love shaving grams off the gear I carry when backpacking, bikepacking, and trail running. So imagine my delight when Nitecore released a new generation of its ultralight NB10000 battery. After a few weeks with it I can confidently say: Haribo be damned!The $83.95 NB10000 Gen 4 weighs just 146 grams, according to my scale, and measures 1.45 x 11.6 x 4.68cm (0.57 x 4.57 x 1.84 inches), according to Nitecore’s spec sheet. That makes it the lightest…

When I first got access to Siri AI through Apple’s iOS 27 Developer Beta in June, I’ll admit I wasn’t overly optimistic. We’d been waiting two years by then, and, in all honesty, I thought Apple was unlikely to compete with the likes of Google Gemini and ChatGPT, which had years on poor old Siri by then. But then I tried Siri AI, asked it some pretty tricky questions to see if I could catch it out, and it turns out I was wrong to underestimate it. Siri was the first personal assistant, after all, and while Gemini, Alexa and…

Apple’s iOS 27 is now available in public beta, which gives iPhone enthusiasts the chance to play around with some of the less pronounced but ultimately welcome changes to the operating system. One such change is the ability to get the clock out of the way of your carefully chosen lock screen wallpaper. Recent versions of iOS have enabled users to alter the size of the clock and even tuck it behind key elements of the photo you’ve chosen to front up your lock screen. However, in iOS 27, iPhone users will be able to shift the clock into the…

The Birdfy Feeder Rookie is a good option if you’re new to birdwatching or simply don’t want to spend a lot on a smart feeder, and several configurations are on sale. The standard model is down to $59.99 ($60 off) at Amazon, which is close to its lowest price. It includes seven days of access to its AI-powered features that can identify different kinds of birds (after the trial expires, it can identify birds up to 10 times per day without a subscription). Alternatively, you can get a version that permanently unlocks its AI bird identification for $85.49 ($34 off)…

A growing number of bars, restaurants and other entertainment venues across the UK are banning patrons from wearing smart glasses, like the Meta Ray-Bans, on well-justified privacy grounds. The specs contain cameras that enable wearers to capture pictures and video. The potentially serendipitous nature of the recordings has seen the products labelled “pervert glasses”. And at the very least it throws up issues of consent. That’s what the establishments saying “no” to the tech is concerned with – the idea that you shouldn’t randomly be filming people when they’re out having a nice time. You wouldn’t do it with your…

Recent internal evaluations of an OpenAI model called Astra indicate that it offers “significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity,” according to the company. “These results, in addition to expert assessments, have led us to conclude last night that we cannot rule out critical cyber capabilities under our Preparedness Framework⁠.”Here is how OpenAI defines a “critical” cybersecurity threshold:Under our Preparedness Framework, a model reaches the Critical cybersecurity threshold if it can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels in many hardened real-world critical systems without human intervention, or can devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks…

Sony may be planning to relaunch a version of the WH-1000XM4 noise cancelling headphones, despite the erstwhile classics being succeeded twice in the last six years. According to a new leak, Sony may choose to bring back the WM4 cans next month. They would maintain the hardware within the original 2020 model, but contain slightly smaller battery. That would shave four hours off the original lifespan of 38 hours. The word comes from the highly reliable Roland Quandt of WinFuture, who also claimed the refreshed headphones would include a new Lavender colour. It’s not immediately clear why Sony would countenance…

Microsoft Edge is ending support for the Manifest V2 extensions platform, which will cut off the uBlock Origin adblocker and others like it, just like Google Chrome did earlier this year. According to Microsoft, there are only 58 extensions on the Edge Add-On Store “with any meaningful usage” that still use MV2, and only three of those aren’t available on the newer MV3 platform. Anyone still using these extensions can switch to a different adblocker, like uBlock Origin Lite. Or they could use a different browser, like Opera, which still supports existing MV2 extensions and says it will continue to…

There’s something magical about using instant cameras that smartphones can’t match. You can capture a moment, print it out, and then give the photo as a gift or hold onto it. Image quality won’t be all that good, but imperfections are part of the allure.We tested instant camera models from popular brands and landed on a handful that we think are the best. Some aim to preserve the classic experience above all else, while others support companion apps and the ability to print stored photos.Fujifilm’s latest Instax cameras are the best out there for most people. The company’s Instax Mini…

Some of the biggest names on Google’s AI team got new jobs this week. In some cases, including for legendary Googler Jeff Dean, those jobs are no longer at Google. Given that Google’s models seem to be behind the best of what’s coming out of anthropic and OpenAI, is this a sign of Google in turmoil? Is it about Demis Hassabis wanting something more interesting to work on than virtual assistants? Or is there something else entirely happening here?After that, we talk about Disney’s plan to put even more stuff in the Disney Plus app, David Ellison’s defense of… David…