Weekly output: AT&T 5G, Meta breakup bid blocked, Mozilla Foundation, social-media usage, Starship and New Glenn

I spent much of the only week in November not disrupted by my own travel schedule catching up on things from the previous two weeks. As you can see from the list below, that was an incomplete exercise.

(Speaking of previous weeks, I also wrote a post for Patreon supporters recapping my experience at Web Summit in Lisbon.)

11/17/2025: AT&T Boosts 5G Speed and Capacity With EchoStar Spectrum, PCMag

Having written in September about Boost Mobile’s plans to sell this spectrum to AT&T, I felt obliged to cover AT&T putting those frequencies into service sooner than I would have imagined possible.

11/19/2025: Court Rejects FTC’s Bid to Break Up Meta, Finds It’s Not a Social Media Monopoly, PCMag

I didn’t span on spending a large chunk of Tuesday afternoon reading a judge’s opinion about the Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to order Meta to undo its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. I also didn’t expect to find the judge’s analysis of Facebook so relatable.

11/20/2025: With Its Next Big Thing, Mozilla Wants to Do More Than Improve the Web, PCMag

The interview at the center of this post happened two weeks earlier, so I appreciated the Mozilla Foundation providing some details about early proposals received since then for its AI-for-democracy funding program.

11/20/2025: Among Social Media Users, Reddit Soars As X Stagnates, PCMag

Thursday had no work items on my calendar, so I could cover this new report from the Pew Research Center about which social platforms have earned time on the schedules of Americans.

11/21/2025: SpaceX’s Starship Suffers Major Test Mishap a Day After Blue Origin Unveils Rocket Upgrade Plans, PCMag

I was going to spent Friday writing a post about an information-security conference I attended Tuesday, but then SpaceX had the booster stage of its Starship rocket fail catastrophically in a ground test a day after that company’s increasingly-capable rival Blue Origin outlined some ambitious upgrades to its own New Glenn launch vehicle.

#att5g #blueOrigin #blueskyUsage #boostMobile #facebookInstagram #ftcVMeta #metaBreakup #mozillaFoundation #newGlenn #pewResearchCenter #socialMedia #spacexStarship #starship

Weekly output: NextGen Acela, Evernote V11, Verizon CEOs, RGB LED, screen time, Cranky Dorkfest, Verizon buys Starry, AT&T standalone 5G, TiVo DVRs

This week will have me crossing a state off my states-visited list for the first time since 2009–Wisconsin, where Oshkosh Corp. is hosting a press day to show off its government and industrial vehicles, including the U.S. Postal Service’s new and behind-schedule duckface trucks. I don’t have a good explanation for why I had not set foot in that state sooner and can only apologize to America’s Dairyland for the extended oversight.

10/6/2025: Amtrak’s new Acela trains can’t keep up with high-speed rail, Fast Company

After taking the new trains to and from New York at the end of August, I had ambitions of writing this story much faster than I did–sort of like how Amtrak had ambitions of getting the new train into service much sooner than it did. But getting the level of detail that I wanted about the railroad’s plans to upgrade the power infrastructure along the Northeast Corridor took more time than I expected.

(I included the full text of Amtrak’s detailed explanation of its plans to improve the catenary along the NEC in the commentary-enhanced version of this post that I published early on Patreon.)

10/6/2025: Major Evernote Update Taps AI for Search and Transcription, But Not Writing, PCMag

I had about an hour Friday to quiz Evernote product lead Federico Simionato about Bending Spoons’ plans for the note-taking app that it bought in 2023, and which I’ve used since 2010–so of course I took notes in my Mac’s copy of Evernote while using the Android app to record our conversation for subsequent AI transcription.

10/6/2025: Verizon Hot-Swaps Current CEO for Ex-PayPal Boss, PCMag

I don’t usually cover C-suite departures and arrivals, but I had some free time. And Verizon’s new chief executive Dan Schulman has a sufficiently interesting backstory–see the New York Times’ interview of him in 2008–that I told my editors I could pick up this item.

10/7/2025: RGB LED Is Getting Its Time in the Spotlight. Will TV Shoppers Tune In?, PCMag

I started writing this post at IFA–the first version had a Berlin dateline. But then I got sufficiently sidetracked and got in enough reporting after that tech trade show for the piece to evolve from an event recap to a broader assessment of a tech development.

10/8/2025: It’s Not Just You: Parents Everywhere Struggle to Set Screen-Time Boundaries, PCMag

Pew’s data about the level of technology use respondents to its survey allowed among kids 12 years old or younger made me feel slightly better about my own attempts at digital parenting.

10/8/2025: What happens when online plane enthusiasts meet up IRL?, Fast Company

This recap of Cranky Dorkfest 2025 was easily the most fun that I’ve had with a story since the last time I went to Florida to see a space launch.

10/8/2025: Verizon to Buy Wireless Broadband Pioneer Starry, Fold It Into Its Home Internet Service, PCMag

Writing this sent me back a ways–both to writing about Starry in its early days, including a December 2017 feature for Yahoo Finance, but also to covering Starry founder Chet Kanojia’s previous venture, the local-TV-streaming service Aereo that the Supreme Court put out of business in a dubious 2014 opinion.

10/9/2025: AT&T Switches on Standalone 5G Nationwide, Unlocking Future Network Slice Services, PCMag

This post also covers Verizon’s advances in standalone 5G, about which that carrier has been quieter than AT&T and T-Mobile.

10/9/2025: Time’s Up for a Timeshifting Trailblazer: TiVo Discontinues Its Standalone DVRs, PCMag

I would have written this much faster if I didn’t get sucked down a rabbit hole of old TiVo posts and reviews, followed by my checking my own TiVo purchase history.

#Acela #Amtrak #ATT5G #avgeek #BendingSpoons #CrankyDorkfest #DanSchulman #digitalParenting #Evernote #fixedWireless #fixedWirelessBroadband #highSpeedRail #IFA #LAX #NEC #NextGenAcela #NortheastCorridor #PewResearchCenter #RGBLED #screenTime #Sony #standalone5G #StarryInternet #Verizon5G #VerizonCEO

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