Sling TV really wants to be your favorite cord-cutting service. It’s spent the last couple of years getting itself on not just Roku, but FireTV and Apple TV (4th generation) for $20 a month with no contract, which is a pretty incredible feat in this Comcast, Time warner, Optimum world. The Meridian, Colorado-based company has been pushing interesting promotions all month long in celebration of SlingTV’s birthday month. What better way to “pull a hobbit” and give gifts for your b-day than to hook geeks up with content.

Last weekend, Sling TV gave their Blue and Orange users free access to HBO’s online content library just long enough for them to take in new series like Big Little Lies and Crashing. This weekend, Sling TV is opening up the Internet tubes to allow their subscribers unlimited access to STARZ, the premium cable network that brought us the smash hit time-traveling period drama, Outlander, based on the novels by author Diana Gabaldon. STARZ is also responsible for Black Sails, a period pirate drama for those looking for a bit more substance than the swashbucklers in Disney’s high-seas franchise.

Sling TV, the cord-cutting, no-contract, live TV and VOD service is turning two years old this winter. And like a Hobbit, they’re giving friends (customers), both new and old, some birthday presents to celebrate.

So the question is: Are you a Sling Blue or Sling Orange subscriber? If so, you’re in luck! A free weekend of HBO access begins today.

There are a LOT of companies peddling products here at CES. We’ve got smart cameras that auto-send images to Facebook and double-washing machines that allow you to clean two separate loads of clothes at once without ruining them or taking up more space.

But among all of the keynotes, Bosch stuck out, as board member Werner Struth spoke about their plans for the future. The private company’s leader of North and South American operations managed to speak with certainty not about the next whizbang product or another device was going to be the next big thing, but rather about how combining two mundane technologies (home appliances and internet connectivity) and ending up with extraordinary products. He’s spent the last year “figuring out how technology can do better for all of us.”

Somewhere and sometime in some imagined future, protagonists in fashionable yet slightly over-fitted clothing have stealthily stolen in to some grand facility, mercilessly protected by a merciless faction, hell bent on doing something dastardly. They access a panel with their device and a keyboard is projected onto the surface in front of them.

Or maybe that was me and a few other reporters gathered around the founder of a Kickstarter campaign here at CES 2017. Serafim Technologies, a Taiwanese-based company led by CEO GZ Chen, has a new toy called iKeybo in store for all those who’ve imagined what it would be like to set words down my tapping nothing but mere light.

In case you needed another reason to go Alexa rather than Google, the media gods have got one for you. The avalanche of CES 2017 press conferences hadn’t even begun when the news came in from Dish Network. In addition to their Sling Box and their 2014 breakthrough, no-contract live-streaming cable service, SlingTV, Dish decided to take another leap forward in delivering television entertainment to their consumers — support for Amazon‘s Alexa Voice Services or AVS.

Dish users with Hopper DRV devices of any generation will be able to control them using their voice through Amazon’s Echo or Echo Dot hardware.