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Indoor Gardening For the Brown Thumb

by RachelleWoodhou Posted on May 2, 2019

Do you have a knack for killing your indoor houseplants? While all plants require some TLC, cultivating a green thumb doesn?t need to be hard. If you?ve been known to have a brown thumb, the trick to success is finding some greenery that only requires occasional attention.

Start by choosing a few easy-to-grow varieties and selecting plants that are right for your home. Before you settle on any specific type, pay attention to the natural light from your windows. All plants need some light, but some like it bright, while others do well in lower settings. Be sure to read the plant tags to find one that will do well with the light in your house.

6 easy-to-grow houseplants

Ready to take the plunge into indoor gardening? Start with one or two of these low-attention varieties:

Philodendron

This lush green houseplant is easy to keep vibrant all year. It won?t do well baking in the hot sun all day, but medium-to-bright light is okay. Let it grow long in a hanging basket, or put it in a cute pot and keep it short with an occasional haircut. Don?t worry?trimming won?t hurt it.

Snake

Also known as the mother-in-law?s tongue, the tall spikes on this plant are stunning. This variety can live for a long time and does best in low-to-medium light. It doesn?t like extra water, so always let it dry out before watering again, and pour out any excess water in the pot?s saucer.

Aloe vera

Aloe is a sun-loving succulent that does not like water?an especially good starter plant for a brown thumb. To care for it, place it in your brightest window, let the soil dry before watering, and remove any standing water from the pot.

Umbrella

Also known as a Schefflera, this easy-to-grow plant likes medium light. Let it dry out between watering?start by watering it once a week and see how it does.

Asparagus fern

Lacy and trailing, the asparagus fern is perfect for a tall stand or hanging basket. This plant likes humidity, making it a great choice for a kitchen or bathroom. It does well in medium-to-bright light with frequent watering. One thing to note: Although it has soft foliage, there are thorns on the stem.

Spider

With long, variegated leaves, this plant will add the perfect green hue to your d?cor. This variety prefers moist soil and low-to-medium light. To keep it from drying out too quickly, don?t place it near a heat vent.

Three steps to indoor gardening success

These three simple steps can help you grow an indoor garden you?ll want to show off:

Put your plant in a bigger pot

When you pick up a small, full plant at the garden center, you?ll find the most success by repotting it as soon as you get home. A small pot can only hold a small amount of nutrients and water. To keep it looking as good as the day you bought it, switch it to a bigger pot, so it has plenty of room to grow. Plus, this gives you a chance to move it from the plastic nursery container to a pot that matches your furnishings.

These steps will help you properly repot your plant:

Choose a pot slightly bigger than the current container. It should have a drain hole and a saucer to catch any extra water that escapes.
Place a rock over each of the pot?s drain holes to keep dirt from clogging them.
Place a small amount of potting soil in the bottom of the pot.
Gently remove your new plant from its old container and place it in the bigger one.
Fill the pot with dirt by lightly spooning it around the plant. Leave about an inch of space at the top, so it doesn?t overflow when you water it.

Feed with love

If you don?t have a natural green thumb, you probably don?t use fertilizer very often. Never fear?you have a few easy options. You can choose to sprinkle time-release fertilizer on top or use fertilizer spikes that are pushed into the soil. Both last for months. Note on your calendar when it will be time to fertilize again.

Remember to water

A once-a-week watering schedule is all you need with these suggested houseplants. A few, like the aloe and the snake plant, can skip a week if the soil still seems moist. The trick to remembering to water is to pick a day and stick to it. A reminder alarm on your phone is a great way to get into a watering routine.

Your plant will tell you if it becomes unhappy. You might see it wilt, turn yellow, or get spots on the leaves. If this happens, go back to the basics. By making sure it has the right amount of light and giving it the proper amounts of water, you?ll soon be able to show off your green thumb with a beautiful indoor garden.

A home and gardening expert,?Lea Schneider?has published?advice?in?publications like?The Washington Post, Woman?s Day, Family Circle, Consumer Reports?ShopSmart, and Better Homes and Gardens.?She?covers home-improvement and gardening tips for?Groupon.?You can find savings on gardening supplies and more?on Groupon?s Home Depot page here.

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Indoor Gardening For the Brown Thumb

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New Yorker Cover Takes a Swing at Trump’s White House

by MarciaBrummitt Posted on March 31, 2017

Mother Jones

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The New Yorker offered a preview of its newest cover Friday, which takes aim at President Donald Trump and the ongoing chaos within the White House. The cover illustration, which features an unflattering looking Trump using the White House as his personal golf course, comes amid mounting anger over the president’s frequent golf trips. Trump appears on track to outpace former President Barack Obama’s visits to the golf course—despite routinely complaining that his predecessor enjoyed golfing from time to time.

Illustrator Barry Blitt, the mastermind behind several other recent covers that appeared critical of the president, explained to the magazine:

“I see that the word ‘duffer’ is defined as ‘a person inexperienced at something, especially at playing golf,’” Barry Blitt says, about his cover for the upcoming issue. “That’s the word that comes to mind as I watch President Trump plowing one drive after another through the glass windows of American politics.”

Coincidentally, the Economist‘s upcoming issue also features an image of a golf course, with someone attempting to dig themselves out of a hole. The image is paired with the headline, “The Trump presidency so far.”

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New Yorker Cover Takes a Swing at Trump’s White House

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No, Millennials Are Not Wizards With Computers

by TomasStanfill4 Posted on January 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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Happy New Year!

I promise this post is not about Donald Trump, even though it starts with him. Here he is talking further about the whole hacking episode:

“I don’t care what they say, no computer is safe,” he added. “I have a boy who’s 10 years old; he can do anything with a computer. You want something to really go without detection, write it out and have it sent by courier.”

Trump’s proposal of a massive new executive branch courier service is intriguing as the foundation of his promise to create more jobs, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. Rather, I want to talk about the myth that young people are all geniuses with computers.

As usual, I won’t claim any huge expertise here. However, I do interact with young ‘uns periodically, mostly pretty smart ones. However, even they generally have no real expertise with computers. Far from it, in fact. What they do have is (a) a general familiarity with the UI conventions of modern smartphone apps, and (b) a deep and encyclopedic familiarity with the handful of apps they use constantly. This provides a surface sheen of expertise, especially to older folks who don’t use smartphones much.

But dig an inch below the surface and most of them don’t really know much. Grab your stereotypical person on a street corner and ask them, say, when the French left Vietnam. Or what vegetable has the most Vitamin A. These take about ten seconds each to answer (1954-56,1 sweet potatoes), but most people struggle with stuff like this, and young folks struggle just as much as anyone. Ditto for any app they aren’t familiar with, especially on a platform they aren’t familiar with.

There’s nothing unusual about this. Ask a question about Facebook on an iPhone and you’ll get a flurry of activity from your average teenager but only a blank stare from me. Ask more generally about some problem on a Windows machine, and I can probably help you while your average teenager will now be the one with the blank stare.

On average, young people are more comfortable around computers than older people. Show them a new app and they’re generally willing to learn it, while us older coots probably don’t want to bother unless we really think it’s going to be useful. Younger generations also have different preferences thanks to these apps (text vs. phone calls, news aggregators vs. weekly newsmagazines, etc.). But that’s about it. In the sense of broad knowledge of computers and networks, or the ability to find information, or the ability to produce useful work with their computers, Xers and millennials aren’t any more savvy than the rest of us.

But the flying fingers on their smartphones, along with their deep familiarity with the apps they use, provide an aura of expertise so compelling that it seems almost genetically inborn. Mostly, though, it’s an illusion.

Of course, even with that illusion affecting our judgment, most of us don’t believe that ten-year-olds “can do anything with a computer.” For that level of idiocy, you really need Donald Trump.

1OK, I’ll confess that finding the 1956 component of that answer took me more than a few seconds. The French agreed to leave in 1954, and the last troops left in 1956.

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No, Millennials Are Not Wizards With Computers

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A Huge Chicken Company Wants its Birds to Play More Before They’re Slaughtered

by LannyIsabel51 Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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“Do the birds get what they want?” Perdue executive Bruce Stewart-Brown asked. We were surrounded by 20,000 squawking chickens in a vast indoor facility in Maryland. I was in the midst of reporting a Mother Jones deep-dive on the meat industry’s over-use of antibiotics crucial to human medicine, and how Perdue had moved decisively away from that practice.

At the time, Stewart-Brown’s rhetorical question sounded a bit silly, coming from a company that slaughters and packs 650 million chickens per year, making it the nation’s fourth-largest poultry company. Yet as I found during my reporting, Perdue isn’t just any chicken producer. Unlike all of the other industry giants, the company had quietly begun to move away from antibiotics around a decade ago.

Now Perdue has announced an animal welfare program that seems as ambitious as its move away from drugs. The company has committed itself to following the Farm Animal Welfare Council’s “five freedoms” for farm livestock, the most notable of which are the “freedom from discomfort,” “freedom to express (most) normal behavior by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind,” and “freedom from fear and distress.”

“Our goal is to double the rate of play/activity by our chickens in the next three years,” the company states in a newly released “Commitment to Animal Welfare.” Moreover, acknowledging that modern chickens have been bred to grow rapidly, causing leg injuries and making it very difficult to walk late in their lives, Perdue says it’s considering moving to “breeds of birds that grow slower.”

In concrete terms, the facilities that house Perdue’s birds will eventually be outfitted with windows, giving them access to sunlight, and be less densely stocked, giving the birds more room. The company so far hasn’t released details on how much more space birds will get (the current industry standard is eight-tenths of a square foot per bird). As for the windows, the company plans to install windows in 200 of the 6,000 existing poultry houses that supply it. They’ll be used as a kind of controlled experiment, to “compare bird health and activity to enclosed housing.” If the windows prove effective in increasing activity among the flock, “we will establish annual targets for retrofitting houses with windows,” Perdue states. All new chicken houses will be required to have windows.

New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom got a look at one of the the window-equipped chicken houses, run by an operation that contracts for Perdue:

Sunlight floods the floor at one end of the chicken house here at Ash-O-Ley Acres, and spry little Cornish game hens flap their wings and chase one another. At the other end of the barn, where the windows are covered as part of a compare-and-contrast demonstration, the flock is largely somnolent and slow to move.

In addition to responding to long-simmering animal-welfare complaints about factory-scale farming, Perdue is also openly discussing another highly controversial topic: Big Poultry’s reliance on nominally independent farmers to grow their chickens, under contract terms that largely favor giant processing companies like Perdue. (See my piece on a particularly presumptuous contract term that Perdue quickly nixed when I exposed it.)

Normally, when a big chicken company decides it wants to change something about the enormous barns where its birds are grown, it merely changes the terms of its contracts, forcing farmers to upgrade their facilities or risk losing their market. In this case, Perdue will pick up the cost of retro-fitting the 200 pilot houses, a company spokeswoman told me. As the windows program expands, the company says it will continue to pick up at least part of the cost. “We’ll determine how it will get paid for,” the spokeswoman said, “whether we will pay for it directly or compensate the grower through a premium for upgraded housing or…a cost-share or financing approach.”

And the company’s “Commitment to Animal Welfare” document even includes a pledge to “do a better job listening to farmers and communicating with them.” Rather than set pay solely based on factors like efficiency and output, contracts will include incentives for “care of the birds and welfare performance,” the document states. A Perdue spokeswoman added that the company is consulting with farmers to figure out the best way to compensate them for making the birds’ lives better.

Of course, as with all voluntary corporate initiatives, Perdue sets the terms of the program and controls the information that emerges from it. As Maryn McKenna notes on the National Geographic website, “For most of its initiatives, the company has not disclosed a timeline.” But as I discovered in my reporting, Perdue’s anti-antibiotics effort proved to be the real deal, and it has pulled the bulk of the poultry industry in the same direction. Perhaps its animal-welfare reforms will do the same.

Leah Garces, executive director of Compassion in World Farming, which released a video in 2014 exposing harsh welfare conditions on a Perdue-contracted farm, thinks they just might. “Just as Perdue led the way on antibiotics, they are laying out the inevitable direction of the market,” she said. “I’m confident every poultry company today is thinking hard about steps they also need to take to improve the lives of chickens in order to keep up.”

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A Huge Chicken Company Wants its Birds to Play More Before They’re Slaughtered

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Eco-Friendly Passive Homes Don’t Need AC to Stay Cool

by AlbertoMueller Posted on June 10, 2016

While Americans look for ways to make their homes more efficient, European designerscontinue building energy-sealed, so-called passive homes that make our Energy Star appliances look like minimal contributions to the cause. Passive architecture has caught on in the Pacific Northwest and abroad, but its yet to take hold in most of the United States. Have you heard about the passive home trend?

What is Passive Design?

Passive homes are extremely energy-efficient buildings that require no air conditioning or heating systems. They are sealed so tightly that no air can escape the interior of the home, leading to absolutely minimal heat transfer. As a result, the temperature in the home stays extremely comfortable year-round, resulting in a huge decrease in energy expenditure.

So how do builders make this happen? It all starts with very, very thick walls. According to the New York Times, a passive home built in a cold state like Minnesota wouldrequire walls that are up to 18 inches thick. Windows are also paned multiple times and are manufactured with a similar thick design.

Humidity is kept in check and air recycled through ventilators that mix fresh, outside air with inside air. These systems use only minimal energy and keep the air inside the structure feeling fresh and clean.

All of these factors result in huge energy savings, but owners of passive homes will tell you that even the reduced heating bill costs cant match the greatest benefit of living in a climate-controlled environment: comfort.

What matters is that I have never lived in such a comfortable house, Don Freas of Olympia, Washington, told the New York Times.

Why Hasnt the Trend Caught on in the US?

The U.S. is lagging behind other countries when it comes to implementing passive technology. The knowledge of how to build these structures has been around since the 1990s, but because gas and energy remain relatively affordable in the U.S.as opposed to in other countries, where they are much more expensive, incentivizing homeowners to make energy-efficient decisionsAmerican homeowners have been slow to jump on the bandwagon.

Nearly 30,000 of these houses have already been built in Europe, reports the New York Times. In Germany, an entire neighborhood with 5,000 of these super-insulated, low-energy homes is under construction, and the City of Brussels is rewriting its building code to reflect passive standards.

So far in the U.S., only 90 passive homes have been certified. Some builders argue that the reason for slow U.S. growth has been the countrys vastly varying climate. While passive homes are relatively popular in the Pacific Northwest where the climate is mild and comparable to that of Europe, they require different technologies to function in the humid Midwest, cold northern regions and hot Southwest.

If U.S. builders can learn to adapt for the countrys various climates, it could be a boon for the environment. Mother Earth News reports that while an Energy Star-certified home could save energy expenditure by about 20 to 30 perfect, a passive home would increase that efficiency to 90 percent. Well have to see how passive homebuilding stacks up to other energy-saving building practices in the U.S. moving forward.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Eco-Friendly Passive Homes Don’t Need AC to Stay Cool

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Friday Cat Blogging – 6 May 2016

by RosellaSchmid Posted on May 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Yesterday was a tough day: my computer went nuts and wouldn’t let me get any work done. The symptoms were bizarre: I couldn’t open any menus. They’d just flash on the screen and disappear. I couldn’t open apps. I couldn’t close apps. I could highlight text, but I couldn’t copy or paste it. I couldn’t even open the Start menu to reboot the machine. What the hell is going on with Windows 10?

Perhaps you can already figure out how this story ends? It turns out that Windows is fine. I’m sorry for doubting you, Microsoft. The bug turned out to be neither software nor firmware, but catware. Hilbert had his paw hanging out of the pod and was pressing the Escape key. When I removed his paw, everything worked fine again.

Really, the things we cat owners staffers put up with is astounding.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 6 May 2016

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Unlike Diamonds, E-Books Are Not Forever

by ArlieMSZaecq Posted on December 5, 2014

Mother Jones

Microsoft is getting a divorce from Barnes & Noble:

On Thursday, the two companies parted ways, with Barnes & Noble buying out Microsoft for about $125 million. In other words, in just over two years, the value of the Nook business has lost more than half its value.

….And yet despite these grim numbers, Barnes & Noble has reason to look favorably on its relationship with Microsoft. The initial $300 million investment gave the bookseller an infusion of cash when it needed it most….Microsoft, meanwhile, was hoping that the Nook software would bolster its own tablet business, making it a more viable competitor to Apple’s iPad. That didn’t pan out, and Microsoft was left committed to a declining Nook business that was adding little to its own ambitions in the tablet market.

This highlights one of the big problems with e-books: what happens when there’s no software left to read them? I’m a big user of the Nook app on my Windows tablet, but its demise was announced months ago. Microsoft doesn’t care about Nook because it’s not a killer app for Windows 8, and B&N doesn’t care about Windows 8 because Windows tablets have a minuscule market share. So the app died. For now everything is still fine, but it’s inevitable that when upgrades stop, eventually an app stops working for one reason or another. Will I then be able to read my Nook books in some new Microsoft reader? Or will I just be up a creek and forced to switch to an iPad or Android tablet? There’s no telling.

It’s weird. I think I now know how Mac partisans used to feel when Microsoft was eating their lunch. They all believed that Macs were obviously, wildly superior to anything from Redmond, and were only on the edge of extinction thanks to massive infusions of marketing by an industry behemoth. Now I’m in that position. After considerable time spent on both iPad and Android tablets, I find my Windows tablet obviously, wildly superior to either one. It’s not even a close call. But the market disagrees with me. The few drawbacks of Windows 8, which I find entirely trivial, are deal breakers for most users, and as a result app makers have stayed away. This causes yet more users to avoid the Windows platform and more app makers to stay away, rinse and repeat.

What a shame. I guess I can only hope that by the time Windows tablets are consigned to the dustbin of history there will finally be an Android tablet that’s actually usable by adults who want to do more than update their Facebook pages. We’ll see.

POSTSCRIPT: Of course, this wouldn’t be a problem—or not such a big problem, anyway—if Amazon and other e-book vendors allowed third-party apps to display their books. But they don’t, which means Amazon’s monopoly position in e-books also gives them a monopoly position in e-book readers. This is really not a situation that any of us should find acceptable.

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Unlike Diamonds, E-Books Are Not Forever

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Friday Cat Blogging – 24 October 2014

by BudLionsxdip Posted on October 24, 2014

Mother Jones

We’re a little late with catblogging today, but that’s not bad under the circumstances—which partly include all those meddling doctors with their tests and pills and questions, but are actually mostly technological. For the most part, the Windows tablet and the new phone have been godsends in the hospital. The Windows tablet, running standard—and fully synced—Firefox, allows me to blog with no trouble, unlike either my iPad or Android tabs. Windows OneDrive gives me access to every picture I’ve ever taken of the cats. And the hotspot on the phone is fast and reliable, unlike the hospital WiFi system.

Unfortunately, I don’t have Photoshop installed, and probably never will since it’s now astronomically expensive and available only by subscription. Even the simplest image editing is a trial with only MS Paint to work with, so any post with a picture is sort of torturous to publish.

But I’m a professional, and nothing is too much work for my loyal readers. So here you go. That’s Hopper on the right, grooming a slightly bemused Hilbert, who joined in a few seconds later and turned both cats into blurs.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 24 October 2014

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All About Blackshades, the Malware That Lets Hackers Watch You Through Your Webcam

by EUNMadiezhk Posted on May 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Monday, US officials announced the arrest of more than 90 people allegedly connected to an organization called Blackshades, which sold software that allows hackers to easily take over a Microsoft Windows computer remotely. Last year, a college student used the tool to take nude photos of Miss Teen USA via her personal computer’s webcam. According to the FBI and law enforcement officials, the program has been sold and distributed to “thousands” of people in more than 100 countries since 2010, affecting some 700,000 victims. Here’s why you might want to update your anti-virus software, or, if you’re prone to dancing around your room naked, at least put a piece of tape over your webcam.

What is Blackshades?
Blackshades is the name of an organization allegedly owned by a Swedish 24-year-old named Alex Yücel. According to government officials, Yücel and Michael Hogueâ&#128;&#139;, a 23-year-old US citizen who was arrested in 2012 as part of the feds’ tangential investigation into Blackshades, codeveloped the Blackshades remote access tool (RAT). This tool, which sold for as little as $40 at bshades.eu and other sites, essentially allowed buyers to act as peeping Toms on strangers’ computers. The organization made more than $350,000 between September 2010 and April 2014, according to the FBI.

How does the Blackshades Remote Access Tool (RAT) work?
The Blackshades RAT isn’t any different than what your IT person at work uses to get remote access to your computer, explains Runa Sandvik, staff technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT). But if your IT department were accessing your computer, “you’d have a heads up,” she says. “In this case you won’t even know the hacker is on your computer.”

After buying a copy of the RAT software, a hacker has to install the program on a target’s computer, by, say, deceiving a person into clicking on a malicious link. Then, once the hacker has access to a computer, he or she can then use the RAT software to easily record a person’s keystrokes or passwords, take screenshots, rummage through computer files, or turn on the person’s web camera, according to the feds. Anything you can do on your computer, the hacker can do, too. And the software makes it all super easy. In fact, it’s “marketed principally for buyers who wouldn’t know how to hack their way out of a paper bag,” writes Krebson Security. Here’s what the command and control panel looks like:

Symantec

The program also includes “spreaders,” which help hackers send out malicious links from peoples’ social-media accounts, and a file hijacker tool. That tool, according to the FBI press release, allows users “to encrypt, or lock, a victim’s files and demand a ‘ransom’ payment to unlock them. The RAT even came with a prepared script demanding such a ransom.”

What do hackers use remote access tools for?
The FBI says the Blackshades RAT has been used to exploit credit cards, bank accounts, and personal information. But perhaps the creepiest way people can use remote accessing tools is to take photos and video via webcam. In November of last year, a college student pleaded guilty to hacking the webcam of Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf with the Blackshades software, and attempting to blackmail her. He allegedly said he had up to 40 other “slave computers,” according to the original criminal complaint.

Last year, Ars Technica wrote about a thread on a hacker forum that was more than 134 pages long and filled with images captured through unsuspecting women’s webcams. Hackers wielding remote accessing tools—it’s unknown whether they were using Blackshades or other software—called the women their “slaves” and wrote about picking out “the ‘good’ sexual stuff” and categorizing it using names and passwords, according to the news outlet. And last year, a 17-year-old boy in Detroit paid hackers in the Philippines more than $1,000 in blackmail money after they collected video of him via webcam. This tool has been used for political purposes as well. In 2012, the software was sent by alleged pro-government attackers to try and infect the computers of anti-government Syrian activists.

Now that people have been arrested in connection with Blackshades, does this mean I’m in the clear?
Nope. While the sale of Blackshades software, whose main website has now been shut down, was already on the decline (there were more than 1,300 infections last spring, but fewer than 400 in April 2014, according to Symantec), there are other remote accessing tools out there. “Even if there are just 100 people using Blackshades, there are another 100 using a tool with a different name that works exactly the same way,” says CDT’s Sandvik. Additionally, it’s not clear that the FBI will be able to get the Blackshades charges to stick. As the Daily Beast notes, it may be hard for prosecutors to prove whether the defendants who possessed the software used it for illegal activity.

What should I do to keep my computer private?
Follow best security practices. The FBI and security experts recommend that you update your software, including anti-virus software, install a good firewall, don’t open suspicious email attachments or URLs—even if they come from people on your contact list—and create strong passwords. The FBI has also published a list of files that you can search for on your hard drive to see if your computer has been infected. “Regardless of the specific kind, if you get malware on your system, it’s bad,” says Christopher Budd, a spokesman for Trend Micro, a Japanese security software company. “But people shouldn’t worry about malware, they should take concrete steps.” And if you put tape over your webcam, too, no one will judge you. “I do,” says Sandvik.

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All About Blackshades, the Malware That Lets Hackers Watch You Through Your Webcam

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Am I the Only Person in the World Who Thinks Windows 8.1 Is Great?

by gwm6zjf3 Posted on February 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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The AP reports that Microsoft is prepping a Windows update: “Just one year after the Windows 8 launch, Microsoft issued a free update to address some of the gripes. The system now lets people run more than two apps side by side, for instance, and its Internet Explorer browser lets people open more than 10 tabs without automatically closing older ones.”

Atrios comments: “Whenever I read about Windows 8.x I just shake my head.”

This is something I’d usually address in a weekend post, but I was busy this weekend and I’m curious about something. I apologize in advance to the millions of you who couldn’t care less about this.

Here’s what I’m curious about: why is there so much griping about Windows 8.1? (I’m talking specifically about Windows 8.1 here, not the original Windows 8 release.) I ask about this as someone who’s used both an iPad and an Android tablet extensively, and was surprised at just how much I like the Win 8.1 tablet I bought last month. I mostly got it as a lark, but it’s been great. The tile interface is really nice: smooth, clean, and functional. The menu interface, which brings up menus by swiping in from the sides, is very handy. And if you don’t like the tile interface, you can just boot directly to the old-school Windows desktop and never see it again.

Now, I’ll admit that I haven’t used Internet Explorer for at least 15 years, so I didn’t know about the tab thing. That’s kind of dumb. And getting rid of the Start button on the desktop—probably the single biggest source of complaints—was mind-bogglingly stupid. Still, you can fix that with a third-party add-on in about two minutes. It’s really not worth whining about.

This isn’t to say that Windows 8 doesn’t have issues. There are some annoyances here and there, and the app ecosystem is anemic compared to Apple and Android—though, to my surprise, I managed to download very nice apps for every single application I care about. But overall, I’ve found it to be the best tablet OS I’ve used. The tile apps I’ve installed are mostly excellent; performance is good; I like having both a real file system and a real copy of Office; and it allows me to install a full desktop browser, not a stripped-down piece of junk that chugs along like a Model T. Practically the first thing I did when I got the tablet was to install Firefox and hit the sync button. That was great! A browser that actually does everything I want; supports all the add-ins I like; allows me to write blog posts without compromise; and has great performance. Android can’t touch that, and it drove me nuts on my Asus tablet.

Obviously my reaction is based on the limited set of things I personally happen to do on a tablet. I don’t listen to music or play games, for example, so I have no idea if it’s any good in those areas. But I’m curious to hear from other folks who are using Win 8.1 on a tablet. Do you like it? Or does it really have lots of serious drawbacks that I just haven’t run into?

Source:

Am I the Only Person in the World Who Thinks Windows 8.1 Is Great?

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