Ali Abdaal’s travel gear for creators
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Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 23, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about the sudden rise in freight train heists and the strange state of Air Jordans, watching Jon Stewart’s Mark Twain Prize speeches all over again, wondering if I should buy an original Macintosh on eBay instead of continuing to pay my mortgage, scheming to get my hands on the “real” Star Wars lightsaber, tracking at-home workouts with Weller, and trying to replace doomscrolling on my phone with the Chess.com app.
I also have for you a new show from the Silicon Valley creator, a(nother) new calendar app, the hottest new game on the market, a camera worth lusting over, and much more. Let’s get to it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What do you want to know more about? What awesome tricks do you know that everyone else should? What app should everyone be using? 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.)
- Masters of the Air. Okay, so, I need you to clear your weekend schedule. Because first, you’re going to rewatch Band of Brothers, which is exactly as good as you remember. Then, you’re going to watch The Pacific, finally, which you kind of forgot about until recently. Then, you’re going to fire up Apple TV Plus and watch this show, the newest in the kinda-series. Sound good? Good. See you Monday.
- Lumiere. Google Research just kind of quietly dropped a new image-to-video AI model, which it calls “a space-time diffusion model for video generation,” which is an extremely cool thing to call it. As far as I can tell, you can’t actually use it yet, but its results look pretty impressive.
- The Hasselblad 907X & CFV 100C. Quite the name, and quite the price — $8,200! — but also quite the camera. As smartphone cameras continue to eat everything, I love watching high-end cameras get even more beautiful, even more impressive, and even more… real? Non-AI-y? Whatever you call it, it’s all camera and no shenanigans, and I love it. (Also, my colleague Becca Farsace made a super fun video about this thing.)
- The mint Pixel 8. I own a black iPhone, and it’s boring and lame and I wish it looked a lot more like this. Bring back phones with cool, vibrant, unusual colors! I don’t know that I’d buy this one — I mean, Pixel 9 leaks are already happening — but I dig the look.
- Palworld. Technically, I should have mentioned this last week, but it became such a phenomenon this week that we just have to talk about it. Pokemon! With guns! And dubious legal standing! This game is on a historic popularity run, has a weird road ahead of it, and you better believe I will be putting in some hours this weekend.
- Twenty Thousand Hertz: “Into The Huluverse.” This podcast has done a bunch of really great deep dives on tech sounds over the years, like the Netflix sound and the noises electric cars make and the omnipresent TikTok narrator. This one, on the sound you hear every time you open Hulu, is another great entrant in the series.
- In the Know. About once a day, I wish Silicon Valley would come back to HBO. This is the closest I’m gonna get, I think: Mike Judge and Zach Woods made another satire show, only this time, it’s animated and about NPR. I’ve only seen the first episode, which feels extremely “internet in 2024”-y. In a good way. Mostly.
- Transcripts for Apple Podcasts. I’ve been a very happy Pocket Casts user for a long time, and this feature — which generates transcripts for every episode you listen to and scrolls them live like they’re song lyrics — is the first thing I’ve ever been jealous of. Every podcast app should do this.
Last week, I asked you to share what you use to read the news. Or not even news, really, just where you go when you want to know what’s new, what’s going on, what’s the haps. (Sorry for saying “what’s the haps.”) I’ve gotten some great answers and thoughts, and next week, we’re going to dive into that — keep ’em coming to installer@theverge.com. Tell me everything.
This week, I want to do something a little different. On The Vergecast this week, I talked to Ali Abdaal, a creator and author (and doctor!), all about his new book, Feel Good Productivity, and what it means to be a productive and happy and fulfilled person on the internet. Or if it’s even possible.
At the end of our chat, we talked a bit about Ali’s new life as a digital nomad and the gear he’s using to make everything work while he’s on the road. That bit didn’t make it into The Vergecast, but I figured I’d share here. So here’s Ali Abdaal’s setup for life as a creator on the road:
- An Away suitcase, medium sized.
- The Peak Design Travel Backpack, with two camera cubes inside.
- In one cube: a Sony A7S III camera. “My main filming angle.”
- In the other cube: a Sony A7C. “With a 50mm lens, with an extra lens. That’s my photo camera, and it means if I want to do a podcast, I have double cameras, double angles.”
- Two mics: a Sennheiser MKH 416 shotgun mic and a Shure MV7 podcast mic.
- A Falcon Eyes Rollflex light. “It’s a rollable LED panel with a softbox that folds down into like a third of a half of a suitcase. People are always like, ‘Whoa, how does your camera look so good?’ And it’s because of the light. That light is incredible.”
- A Manfrotto Nano light stand. “Which weighs almost nothing.”
Along with all of that, there’s also the requisite set of cables and dongles and an extension cord. Ali says the whole thing just manages to get underneath the 50-pound limit for checked luggage. He’s also carrying a 14-inch MacBook Pro and an iPad Pro in a Peak Design Everyday Sling. And in the course of our chat, I convinced him not to throw it all away and buy a giant gaming laptop, which he seems to desperately want to do. I told him to just get a Switch instead.
One of my favorite new apps in a while officially launched this week. It’s called Amie, and it’s this delightfully designed, slightly bonkers take on managing your time. And after talking to Dennis Müller, Amie’s founder and CEO, I learned he’s up to some really interesting stuff in the calendar space.
