Most of a continent is about to see much colder than usual weather. Forecasts where I am are predicting windchills down to -40, and I have a friend north of me who’s looking at windchills down to -60F. I have a coworker in Texas who’s looking at snow and ice in the next few days as well. Tips like this are useful for folks who live in places that don’t get snow and ice

On this subject, the freaking Windows Mail to Outlook (new) transition that Microsoft foisted upon users sent me deep into the “troubleshooting windows store problems” rabbit hole way too many times. Usually because something broke horrendously with the email account authentication and it would be stuck in an authentication loop without prompting for credentials

The rinse also gets rid of any bugs that might have hitched a ride. There’s some nasty parasites you can completely avoid just by rinsing your produce

Listeria can’t survive cooking so just fully cook any food you get that’s RTE (Ready To Eat). Examples of high risk food included frozen pizza and corn dogs since there’s both meat and bread coming together, each having its own food bourne illness risks. So yeah, fully cook your food.

The good news however is that the FDA takes Listeria very seriously and will stop production at a plant until a battery of thousands of swabs all come back negative. Plants don’t want to be shut down by the FDA so they do their own swabbing very frequently and often have private contractors who also swab very frequently so that they can identify contaminations before they get to the FDA

More good news is Listeria really struggles to compete with other food bourne illnesses, so in a facility that’s really poorly cleaned and maintained, it’ll most likely be a far less deadly pathogen because they beat out Listeria in the competition for resources to grow and spread

Its almost like half-assing a store front that runs like shit, lacks the most basic features and is generally perceived to be user-hostile is a bad way to attract business. When the freaking open source Heroic Game Launcher does a better job hooking into Epic’s servers than their own damn launcher its time to do something. Take one of those millions of dollars you rake in every year and actually invest in the platform for cripes sake!

1. Reduce auto-signouts. This creates friction and forces users to take extra steps to access the game they wish to play. This causes users to go “nah I didn’t really feel like playing that right now anyways”
2. Embed system requirements for games into the launcher. Users want to know if they can even install a game before clicking install
3. Show details about a game that a user has clicked on. Seriously if you’re going to give away a hundred free games a year, folks aren’t going to know jack shit about 90% of the indie titles you’re surfacing. Most of the free titles I’ve actually played I’ve played because the marketing screenshots and description sounded cool, and I don’t want to cross-reference between a web browser and a web-browser-wrapped-into-an-executable-that-runs-like-shit-but-installs-my-games-sometimes
4. SHOW THE GODDAMN DOWNLOAD SIZE AND INSTALL SIZE BEFORE BEGINNING THE DOWNLOAD!!! My god this is not rocket science, its barely even computer science. Its literally the most basic feature of any software installer developed in the last 50 years, show an estimate for about how much hard drive space is needed. If I have 50GB free on a laptop with a 256GB drive in it, its just russian roulette for if I’ll install a game or have to manually sort out my drive being filled to 0 bytes remaining by a game download that never would’ve completed anyways.
5. Stop forcing updates. If someone’s launching a game that needs an update, let them launch it without updating. Also make it easier to force it to check for updates/apply already released updates. The background polling has entirely missed major game updates for my wife’s Fortnite, and since those can be 30+GB downloads we’d really much prefer to run those updates when she isn’t sitting down to play a bit of Fortnite.
6. Actually enable user reviews. Yes this requires moderation which requires workhours and therefore money. This is the kind of thing that that 10% cut of all sales you take is supposed to pay for. Users want to know what they’re getting into before buying a game and committing to installing it and trying it out, let them!
7. Optimize the crap out of your launcher. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it can’t be gestures wildly at everything this. Reduce the filesize of the webpages, run a few fewer javascripts, use better image compression, just most importantly make the launcher not run like its full of molasses

The part that annoys me the most is Epic could simple reduce the free games to bi-weekly and rebudget those same dollars into platform improvements and actually create a viable platform that people don’t hate. Just look at Steam, its got some glaring issues (online DRM, massive illegal gambling problems, cyberbullying, unclear & inconsistent policies on adult content, rampant shovelware, etc. etc.) but by not being a pain in the butt to use, and having some decent company policies that aren’t obviously anti-consumer they have an entire fandom devoted to them. Its just wasted potential. If Tim Sweeney felt like it he could actually build an incredible platform and actually compete with Steam, but instead they just engage in the most disjointed corporate bullshit possible

Their first show (Knights of Guinevere) features a floating amusement park that rains garbage all over the workers below, and robots that have orbs on their heads that produce a silhouette strikingly similar to that of Mickey Mouse

Oh shit is Knights of Guinevere out?