#sling-select — Public Fediverse posts

Weekly output: Sling Select, Alaska Airlines + Starlink, Mark Vena podcast, Verizon Family Line, Bluesky blocks Mississippi

I was going to spend part of Sunday night watching SpaceX’s 10th flight test of its giant, lately star-crossed Starship rocket–but the company scrubbbed the attempt “to allow time to troubleshoot an issue with ground systems.” Given everything else I had on my to-do list, I can’t say I mind the delay.

8/19/2025: Sling Debuts Skinnier $20 ‘Sling Select’ Bundle of 11 Sports, Lifestyle Channels, PCMag

I had to mention Sling’s subscriber totals in this post, so I checked its parent firm’s EchoStar’s quarterly earnings filing and saw not only that number (1.785 million) but a warning about insufficient projected cash flow to pay the company’s upcoming expenses that “raises substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.”

8/20/2025: Alaska Airlines to Switch to Starlink Wi-Fi Starting in 2026, PCMag

My attempt to get some clarification from Alaska about planes equipped with old air-to-ground connectivity hit a bizarre snag: The airline’s mail servers failed to deliver my e-mails to its PR department, instead returning error messages reporting that “the remote server is misconfigured.” My PCMag colleague Michael Kan relayed my queries from his own account, and that worked.

8/21/2025: Ep 114 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Intel, smart glasses, AOL dial-up, new EV battery tech, Ford, Mark Vena

I found a recording of a dial-up modem connecting to AOL to play at the start of that segment of our conversation and also dug out an AOL disk from my home office’s collection of obsolete technology to show off as a prop.

8/22/2025: Verizon Tries to Reinvent the Home Phone Number With ‘Family Line’, PCMag

This wouldn’t have been much of a story without my asking Verizon if you can port an existing number over to this service–and Verizon’s publicist checking and informing me that you can’t.

8/23/2025: Bluesky Blocks Mississippi Users Instead of Making Them Prove They’re Over 18, PCMag

I spent more time than I expected Saturday morning studying the Mississippi law requiring social platforms to verify the ages of new users, which has some confusing and vague parts. I’m not sure that this statute is quite as bad as Bluesky portrays it, but I am sure that Facebook and Instagram are in just as much trouble–which makes Meta’s silence on this issue look sketchy.

#ageVerification #AlaskaAirlines #AS #Bluesky #cordCutting #homePhone #landline #Mississippi #SlingSelect #SlingTV #SpaceX #Starlink #streamingTV #VerizonFamilyLine