I came across a game about guessing accents. You listen to a person read two lines from a Kipling poem, then you’re presented with a list of choices and have to guess the country. For some, you get bonus points for guessing (and you betcha I was guessing) the city. There was one, however, that I didn’t have to guess…Canada. I knew he was Canadian half a dozen words in, and by the time he said “about”, I knew he was from Ontario. I clicked Canada, then looked at the list of cities, and picked Ottawa because that was the only Ontario city listed. I saw Ontario itself as one of the listings, but it isn’t a city, or at least not one in the province of Ontario, Canada. Québec has a Québec City, and there are lots of US cities called Ontario, but the Canadian province has no city by that name. Using logic, I clicked Ottawa…and was marked incorrect. The correct answer was “Ontario”, which is incorrect because I was asked, “For a bonus point, which city?” and Ontario is the name of the province. If there’s any inhabited area in that province that is called the city of Ontario, it must be a tiny village in the extreme north, because nobody’s ever heard of it.

I’m trying to find the “perfect” music manager for me. I use Audacity for just playing a file, but it handles playlists like Winamp 2.x (to be fair, Audacity is forked from XMMS, which is a Winamp clone), and it’s a bit clumsy to not have smart playlists, plus it takes a dog’s age to load files that are located on another drive, or at least if it’s formatted FAT32, it does. Fine if all I want to do is play a few songs while I’m folding laundry, but if I’m busy and need “automatic” music for a period of hours, I’d have to load the files, choose the files from one or more directories, select them and add them. If I’m busy, I’m in a hurry and not too fussy about the specific songs, just the general style, so a smart playlist is perfect, and I don’t want to fuck around with picking individual songs.

Rhythmbox comes installed by default in Ubuntu, integrates nicely with the desktop because it automatically takes on the Gnome theme being used, and overall, it’s pretty damned good. It does do smart playlists by whatever criterion I specify, fetches album art (and allows me to drag-and-drop custom cover art if it can’t find the right image on the web), and if you activate the plugin, it can fetch lyrics. If it can’t find any, you can add them yourself (handy for my non-English stuff). Interface is user-friendly and easy to navigate, and I can pretty much sort the display the way I want (I choose grouped by genre, then sorted by artist name, removing album titles/song length/stuff like that). Inexplicably, what Rhythmbox does not seem to do–or if it does, I can’t find the goddamned setting–is automatically update when I add new stuff, move stuff or edit tags for stuff I have already. I can manually add the folder, but if all I’ve done is add a dozen tracks by Alizée to a directory containing 600 songs, I don’t want to scan the whole goddamned directory all over again, then have it (automatically) remove songs it already “knows” about. It should automatically check the directories on startup and see whether anything new has been added, or anything removed, update any tags that have been changed, and update any appropriate smart playlists (like those set by genre). It should do this without getting in my face, hogging CPU or RAM, and without bothering me. It doesn’t. When I add new music, I want to listen to it, not sit here, scanning the directory so I can select and play the appropriate playlist.

Although I’ve always heard great things about Amarok, I decided instead to try Exaile. In part because the name is kinda cool, and in part because I’d seen it described as, “like Amarok, only better”. If I ever find the person who said that, I’m gonna kick him in the nuts (Linux user, so in all probability, a guy). I suppose that if I were the sort of person who wants to listen to Robbie Williams’ Intensive Care or Rush’s Moving Pictures, Exaile might be just the thing…but I’m not that kind of person. I don’t listen to an album, I listen to my music collection like a radio. Different tracks by different artists, but with something in common. I might be in the mood for 70s pop, or swing, or heavy metal, or classical, but I don’t want to listen to an entire album by the same artist…yet that’s how Exaile sorts the music. I can create smart playlists by artist, genre, or whatever suits my fancy, but if I want to take a quick look at what I’ve got in a particular directory, I’m gonna be clicking a lot of arrows because the closest I can get to sorting the way I want is to tell it to group by artist, and then by album, and then by track. Not particularly helpful, since I’m a lazy tagger, and very often, the album title is “Unknown”. If I have only one song by a particular artist or group because it’s the only one I like, I don’t care what album it’s on because….I don’t have the fucking album, since I didn’t buy it, since I didn’t want the rest of the songs. This setup is for people who always buy CDs, not those of us who most often want only a track or two from a particular artist or group. Also, it needs to stop popping up that stupid window-thing that tells me what I’m playing. It’s my music–I already know what I’m playing! It does allow me to use custom cover art if it can’t find any (I deliberately used a non-North American album to test it), but there isn’t an easy way to edit tags. I can view tag information, and it looks like I can probably edit tags, but couldn’t quickly find a way to add the album name, since I’d forgot to tag it for Alizée.

Finding Exaile lacking, I decided to give Amarok a shot. Maybe “like Amarok, only better” meant that the annoyances from Exaile weren’t present in Amarok. The first thing I didn’t like was that Amarok doesn’t integrate nicely with a Gnome desktop. That makes sense, since it is, after all, a KDE app, and it’s supposed to integrate with KDE (which it would–should look quite nice). It isn’t skinnable, and although I did take a stab at changing the colours so it looked more like my Gnome theme, I never did come up with anything that looked satisfactory. The default “funky monkey” theme (or whatever it’s called) is horrendous, so I didn’t even consider it. Amarok allows me to turn off the splash screen at start (yay), and I can sort my collection by genre (which means “by folder” for me, which is what I want), and I can customise the view so that all I see is the artist and title; I can remove columns for track length, album and other shit that doesn’t matter to me. A big plus is that Amarok does automatically scan the directory I set for new stuff, and changes to existing stuff, and it does so in a pretty unobtrusive manner; just a little status bar at the bottom of the window. It does have smart playlists, and it does start minimised, so I could live with it, but I just can’t look at the window. It’s a KDE app and looks like one, and if I wanted to use KDE, I would. I don’t–haven’t since the Mandrake days–and that’s because…I like Gnome better. Also, Amarok does pop up a stupid thing in front of the window with cover art (nice job on Anne Linnet–I didn’t customise that), and the name of the artist and track. I’d imagine that’s why Exaile does it (because it’s “Amarok, only better”), but I don’t care because I hate things popping up when I didn’t ask to see them. Overall, though, Amarok is pretty good, and if I poked around a bit, I could probably turn off that pop-up thing; I just didn’t bother to look for an option.

A long time ago, waaaay back in the days of 0.2 or so, I tried Songbird. I hate browser players, but Songbird is a bit different. It’s based on browser code and supports browser functions, but is and behaves like a music manager. It was buggy and a little unstable sometimes, but with a version number like 0.2, that’s to be expected. I loved the little cartoon bird “farting” music (amused the hell out of me), and I did use it for a while. Back then, though, I never bothered to tag music, so a music manager wasn’t much use to me. How can it sort my collection if I haven’t given it any data by which to do so? Eventually, though, I did buckle down and get my stuff tagged, so this time, it was much better. More stable, too. Songbird is skinnable, just like Firefox, and the default “feathers” are actually quite nice. I used a different theme, but could have lived with the default dark theme (there’s a default light theme as well). It’s very customisable, and there are many user-submitted add-ons as well. Unlike plugins that (in the Linux world) often require you to find the appropriate plugin directory in your /home and copy the plugins there, Songbird handles add-ons exactly like Firefox (logical, since it’s essentially…Firefox as a music player). Very fast, very simple, and very cool. There is no installation to it; all you do is download, extract and put the folder wherever you want Songbird to live (I put it in my /home). It doesn’t create a menu shortcut, but that’s very simple to do; just fire up Alacarte and create one wherever you want it, complete with custom icon if that tickles your fancy (I just love that little cartoon bird). There are even add-ons for Wikipedia (displays the wiki entry for that artist, if available), and one for…Flickr! If you have the add-on, you can choose to display album art for a particular song, or a mini-slideshow of images from Flickr. I’ll have to say it looks for images tagged with information in the song’s tag, but it was still pretty interesting.

For Nordman’s “Djävul Eller Gud” (my current favourite song…for now), the Flickr add-on found an image of HÃ¥kan Hemlin on stage. It had others, of course, mostly of Nordman, but other things as well. It was actually kind of fun to watch, although what on earth that spruce tree had to do with anything, I don’t know. “Djävul eller gud” means “devil or god” and is the name of both the song and the album, and “nordman” means “north-man”, so I think “nordman” was probably the trigger for the spruce tree. Still, kinda cool, and it found the correct Wikipedia entry.

I decided to try Ola, since he’s adorable, and his little pop songs are as cute as he is. It found the cover art for Good Enough with no help from me, which isn’t bad. I think Amazon has or had it as an import, so that’s probably where it looked, but it was still nice to see. Wikipedia has multiple entries for “Ola”, and he doesn’t use his surname, so I did have to change the search term to “Ola Svensson” to get the right page, but since Songbird is a browser, that was as simple as typing it into the search box, just as I would on Wikipedia in Firefox.

Switching to the Flickr slideshow for this song was kind of fun; I don’t recall seeing many (if any) images of Ola himself, but this image did amuse me. Since Ola isn’t a word, just an alternate form of the name Ole, the keyword triggers for an image of some guy’s hand in his pants pocket must have been either “good enough” (album title), or “feelgood” (song title). If it was “feelgood”, I don’t want to know why his hand is in his pocket! 😆

So far, it’s looking like Songbird is the winner, but I had to leave, so I didn’t get time to play with lyrics searches or check out the whole collection of add-ons. If it turns out that Songbird isn’t to my liking, I’ll have to research and see whether there is a way to make Rhythmbox automatically scan for new stuff, moved stuff and updated tags. I already know I don’t like Banshee because that comes installed with openSUSE. I forget why I don’t like it, but I don’t. 🙂

EDIT: Songbird just won, hands down. The cover art manager is kind of a pain in the arse, but the LyricsMaster add-on found lyrics in English by the Kaiser Chiefs (a relatively obscure group from Leeds) and El Presidente (relatively obscure, from Glasgow), in French from Alizée and (French-Canadian!) Roch Voisine, in Spanish from Juanes and Enrique Iglesias, in Danish by Anne Linnet (more popular) and Thomas Helmig (less well-known outside Scandinavia), and in Swedish from Magnus Uggla (popular artist, but it was a very new single, not on any album), from Sonja Aldén (popular only in Scandinavia), and from Florence Valentin (new, just recently signed to a label). It didn’t do as well with RadU and could not find the Romanian lyrics for “Whap-Pa”, but it did find the English lyrics, and it did find the Romanian lyrics for “Dragosta Din Tei” (though none of the other Romanian tracks on the album). Damned well on five out of six languages, and at least a showing for the sixth, plus it offers a web search option using Google if it doesn’t find any lyrics (that gave me TV-2’s “For Dig Ku’ Jeg Gøre Alting”, in Danish, though still no Romanian for “Whap-Pa”). Nonetheless, that’s quite impressive!

So basically, I’m famous. Okay, I’m not, but yesterday, I did get a FlickrMail request from a very nice lady to use one of my katydid photos.

:: awesome katydid photo

I just love the photos you took of the Katydid (called Often heard, seldom seen). I work with Raleigh Parks and Recreation and am working on a project called the Walnut Creek Wetlands Center that will be built in Raleigh, NC. This urban nature education center will have indoor
classrooms and a beautiful deck overlooking our urban wetlands. It will be open to everyone with no admission charged. We are working on a limited budget, but have incorporated as many sustainable design features as possible. I am currently creating the educational exhibit
signage and I would love for permission to use the photo I mentioned above. We will have audio files of their song to go with the photo. It is my favorite sound of summer! The photo will only be used this one time for the exhibit sign. If you would be willing to let us publish your photo, please let me know what name you would like the photo credited to. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions about the specifics of the sign where I would like to use your photos. Please correspond via my email address rather than through flickrmail:
tiffany.frost@pissoffspambots.ci.raleigh.nc.us.
Many thanks and happy photography!

Of course, I replied and thanked her for the compliment, then told her that my little katydid and I would both be honoured to be a part of the exhibit. I also said that if I had any other shots that would be of use to her, please use them with my blessing. She said that she will try to remember to take a snapshot of the sign for me, and that would be pretty cool, actually; even if I don’t much care about credit (I’m about the educational purposes, not getting my name on something), my mother will be impressed, and will annoy her friends by telling them that her daughter is practically a famous photographer. I’m not, of course, but that won’t stop her. 😉

Anyway, that made my day because I’m always happy when someone finds a use for one of my photos, and this one was a triple-bonus; non-profit, educational and in the spirit of wildlife habitat preservation.

A few hours later, I got another FlickrMail, this one again from NC.

:: your great image

Hi,

I am the director of the NC State University Insect Museum, and I just wanted to let you know that we used your beautiful Carolina mantid image in a blog post:
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/insects?entry=the_insects_of_north_carolina

I hope you don’t mind!
Andy Deans

I looked at the guy’s profile, and he’s a professor; I’ll assume a professor of entomology, since he lists his interest as “parasitic Hymenoptera”. Of course I’m flattered because even if it’s only a blog post, there’s still a chance that my little mantis nymph might inspire someone to become interested (or at least more interested) in the insect world, and that’s certainly one of my goals. I replied (and remembered that he’s “Professor Deans”, not “Mr. Deans”, even though I was half in the bag, since it was Friday night) and I was so flattered that I even took a screencap of the photo in place. 🙂

So, you see, I am basically famous. I don’t care about money, or having my name on something, but I do care very much about honest compliments, and having my stuff used for educational purposes. I’ve had my photos used probably a dozen times before, mostly in the US and Canada, but also in places as far away as a school district in Australia (crab larva photo, used on a CD that is distributed to teach kids about coastal marine life), the UK (photo of water primrose, used in a book about invasive species), and France (shots I took at the zoo that don’t look like “zoo photos”, used on an exotic wildlife site). I don’t know whether they finally decided to use it, but I’d also given permission for a butterfly chrysalis photo to be used in cover art for an indie band’s CD (they’re in CA–SF, I think). They did offer to pay, stating that they couldn’t afford much, but I said just go ahead and use it if you like. Still, it’s never happened twice in the same day, so I was pretty happy. 🙂

At some point, litigious must become downright goddamned retarded. Why else would my chunky peanut butter, clearly labelled “peanut butter”, made from peanuts, containing large chunks of peanuts, and with peanuts listed as the first ingredient bear the bold-texted warning….

WTF? I weep for the demise of common-fucking-sense, since it’s obviously become an anomaly amongst the drooling, mouth-breathing idiots who wouldn’t somehow figure out on their own that peanut butter contained (surprise!) peanuts.

I knew something didn’t look quite right with the “Pray as you go” sign. It’s just barely visible at a 500px width, but this crop of the full-size clearly shows that makers of religious signs (or at least this one) are fucking illiterates. Honestly…”it’s”? Someone please text Jesus with a prayer for a grammar and spelling lesson or two.

I don’t have very expensive photography equipment. It’s not incredibly cheap crap, but for most people, it’s hardly expensive. Still, I was taught early and well (sometimes with Dad’s belt) to take good care of my stuff, and I still do. I use my camera at least weekly, and when I come back from hunting bugs, the camera goes in its case with the lens cap on, the adapter lenses go in their protective cases with their lens caps on, inside my “accessories” case.

Today, we took containers so that we could hunt some food for Valerie. It’s hard to make sure she has a wide variety, but she must for continued good health, and wild-caught insects are naturally gutloaded, so they’re very good for her. It was fucking hot outside, though, and I didn’t feel like hauling a bunch of plastic containers around with me, so (since I usually have my macro adapter on anyway), I caught anything tasty (to Valerie) that I came across in the hard plastic macro adapter case. I carefully stored the sponge pad in the other case so it wouldn’t get dust on it that might potentially scratch the glass, but left the plastic case empty so I could catch a nice, big horsefly, and two fat grasshoppers. Anyway, P had caught a moth, too, so we were out of containers, and I had to leave the fly in the adapter case until we got home. When we did get home, I looked at the state of Valerie’s house, taking note of various insect parts all over the floor, and decided that I’d clean her house tonight. Her abdomen is still nice and round, which means she isn’t really hungry, so if I put the insects in, she probably wouldn’t eat them by the time I was ready to change her bedding. Wrangling a winged (stubborn, wilful) praying mantis is enough on its own, especially with Miffen Skweken Kricken Katchen Katze Hosen (his full name) in the house, so I decided to wait and give her the food critters after she was in a clean house. I didn’t feel like trying to get the horsefly into a container because she loooooves horseflies, and I didn’t want to risk letting it loose in the house (might lose it, and also the fucker might bite if I didn’t find it right away). My macro lens is still safely clipped onto the camera, sitting on my desk, with the lens cap on. Nothing would happen to it.

After I took a shower, I decided to take a nap, as is my habit on weekend afternoons. No longer sweat-soaked and uncomfortable, I booted the laptop and read some news stories/comments for a while, then fell comfortably asleep…until the dream started. I remember it well enough, but to save time (and because it doesn’t matter), the general gist of the thing was that I was bughunting (nowhere familiar, but it was in NS somewhere–I “dream knew” that), and no matter where I went, I kept leaving bits of my camera equipment behind. First, the accessory case and the camera itself, then after I retrieved that, the macro lens, then the accessory case again, and then I couldn’t find the car in the lot (and had forgot to lock it), and then…on and on until I was so worried that I actually woke up. Some part of my anal retentive brain simply could not trust that even though I had not put everything back in protective cases, as I do every week and have done since I got it all, it would still be okay. That part of my brain was determined to have the macro adapter in its case, and the camera in its case. I guess having a brain like would be handy for selling any equipment I had used, because it would be in very good condition, and I’d get a reasonable price out of it, but goddamn, it sucks for trying to take a nap on a Saturday afternoon before having cleaned the mantis cage! 😉

Okay, it’s not surströmming, and it’s not baby mice in the bottom of a bottle of wine, but…

America…fuck yeah!

Jesus Christ, who ever thought this was a good idea? Okay, I’m down with pancakes, and maybe even chocolate chip pancakes (I guess), and I like sausage well enough (especially maple-flavoured, though they’re hard to find here), and I might even have pancakes and sausage for breakfast, but chocolate chip pancake wrapped around sausage…on a stick? Only in America.

Canada…fuckin’ “eh”!

So yeah, it looks as if someone might have eaten it first, cheese curds have a weird, rubbery texture that some people don’t like, and I don’t even want to think a little about the calories or fat, but I must say that when it’s two in the morning and you’re drunk, on your way home from the bar after closing time, a big styrofoam takeout container of poutine is really goddamned good. Québec takes the blame for this Canadian tradition, and you’re most likely to get it “authentic” there, but even as far east as Halifax, you can find pretty good poutine if you know where to look. Hopefully, it’s on the way home from the bar because I can’t even imagine eating this heart-attack-waiting-to-happen if you’re sober.

England…WTF?

The name is sort of odd, especially to North Americans (who have a whole different meaning for the word “faggot”), and although I’ve never had this brand, and nobody told me they were “faggots”, I have had this dish. Whether or not the sauce was authentic West Country, I don’t know, but Dad’s side of the family is pretty authentic West Country, so I suppose it might have been. Tasted like gravy to me, but the pork was pretty good. I’m still putting this here because the name Mr. Brain’s Pork Faggots in authentic West Country sauce amuses the hell out of me. Besides, this is one of the few English foods that’s actually fit to eat. Tripe, anyone? Christ, it used to gross me out to see Gram boiling fucking tripe on the stove, with the ripply/holey bits cresting the bubbles every so often, and no, I never once had the urge to taste it. I have the feeling it’s served with onions to kill the taste and distract you from the rubbery, stomach-y texture. Bleh.

I should’ve been doing something productive, but I was wasting time on a stupid quiz site.

Surprise! I always score high on the “guy side” of these stupid things because they assume that if you’re not a neurotic, overly emotional wreck, you must be a man.

I got only 80% on the punctuation of this one because I used the UK way for a comma after a quotation, not the US way. Yeah, I knew what they wanted–the US way–but I refused. 😀

Ah, it’s so difficult to be a fucking genius…I don’t know how I manage. 😀

Someone else fixed the Music plugin for aMSN so that it had support for Rhythmbox, and since I do use Rhythmbox as my “music manager”, that was fine, but when I just want a player, I use Audacious. The plugin has support for XMMS, but I don’t use that anymore, and really don’t want to use it, and especially don’t want to change my default application for opening music files.

I looked around a bit and found that I wasn’t the only one who wanted to use Audacious with the plugin, and someone thoughtfully provided the code for a script that should work. Being a goddamned genius, I knew all I had to do was copy/paste it into a new file, save it in the Music plugin directory in .amsn, and set it executable. Works perfectly, and when I upgrade and forget that I have a custom addition to the plugin, the code is this:

#! /bin/sh
# Shell script to get informations about the current song playing in Audacious

#Audacious is launched ?
STATUS=$(audtool playback-status)
VERSION=$(audtool get-version)

if [ $? = 0 ]
then
echo $STATUS
MAJ=`expr substr ${VERSION#A*\ } 1 1`
MIN=`expr substr ${VERSION#A*\ } 3 1`

if [ “$MAJ” -eq “1” -a “$MIN” -ge “4” ] || [ “$MAJ” -gt “1” ]
then
#To force \n when there isn’t any information
echo $(audtool current-song-tuple-data title)
echo $(audtool current-song-tuple-data artist)
else
#To force \n when there isn’t any information
echo $(audtool current-song-tuple-data track_name)
echo $(audtool current-song-tuple-data performer)
fi
audtool current-song-filename
else
echo 0
fi

exit 0

Does anyone on my contact list really care what I’m listening to? Probably not, but that isn’t the point. The point is the ability to customise and configure, add stuff and remove stuff, and hopefully not break anything beyond repair, until the result is what I want. Why? Well, because I’m a computer control freak, of course! 🙂

P. wants to learn Spanish, and it will be easier for him if he has someone with whom he can practice. I don’t necessarily give a shit about speaking Spanish, but…meh, whatever. I have Rosetta Stone, but it wasn’t installed, so I decided to install it. Of course, it runs only on Windows, so I booted into XP. That went well enough, even if I did wait 10 minutes for the DVD to load in Explorer (and ended up removing/reinserting the disc because Explorer got “confused” and forgot what it was doing) and even if my goddamned antivirus did interrupt twice (once for signature updates and once for a program update). I got Rosetta installed, fired it up, selected Spanish, Level 1, and…had no sound. Goddamn. XP does that sometimes–loses all sound even though it reports that all hardware is working correctly, and even though I just finished listening ti “Djävul Eller Gud” in Ubuntu, and the card was working fine. Okay, I’ve been here before, so I know the only thing that will work is to remove and reinstall the fucking card. No problem. I check the junk in My Documents, in hopes that I still have the driver download, which is fucking huge because there’s no way to download just the driver; you have to get a bunch of bundled software with it. Fine. Off to creative.com, and….can’t find the right driver. Okay, so let’s try letting it auto-detect the card and see whether it will give me the right one. That doesn’t work with anything but IE, so close FF and open that godforsaken piece of shit IE. Great! It knows I have an SBLive! 24-bit, and helpfully downloads the driver….somewhere. It asks whether I want to start the install, so even though I don’t know where in the temp files it put the install, I want to get the show on the road, and I say “Yes”. The install runs, taking up my entire screen with its splash screen and one tiny active window in the middle, which pisses me off because I don’t need or want to stare at the Creative logo for four minutes, but it runs apparently as it should, and (since Windows is a POS), I have to reboot. I do that, then open my Music folder and try to play Arsenie TodiraÅŸ (goddamn, he’s HAWT). No sound, and XP is complaining about some sys file that it can’t locate. ARRRRGGGGHHHH! For Christ’s sake, this is a PCI sound card from a major manufacturer, not fucking rocket science, and there’s no reason XP shouldn’t be able to make it work, at least with basic features, like…oh, I dunno…SOUND. Okay, so we’ll have to reinstall the driver…except I don’t know where it is because it was downloaded as a temp file. I could look, but decide it will probably be faster to just go download another copy, but this time, don’t use the auto-detect. I poke around Creative’s site, don’t see it at first, but finally, I notice the tiny link at the bottom of the Live! driver page that says “Show all”. No shit–it’s waaaay down at the bottom in 8pt Arial. The drivers for their new, expensive cards are, of course, at the top, but I don’t need another card, I JUST NEED THE FUCKING DRIVER FOR THIS ONE! Okay, so we’ll start the download…holy fuck, it’s 63.3MB. For a driver. Okay, for a driver (usually a few KB), and a bunch of bundled shit that I don’t even want, but it’s the only way to get the driver, so I have no choice. The download speed is going at 1/5 of my available bandwidth, and it’s still not finished even as I type this. I’ll have to remove the card (again), run the full-screen install (again), reboot (again) and then hope it doesn’t complain about the missing sys file (whatever it is…again).

Now, let’s compare this catastrofuck with getting the very same SBLive! 24-bit card working (with surround sound) on Ubuntu….

Step 1: Install Ubuntu.

That’s it–built in support for supported cards, which includes the Live! and Audigy series (except for the cutting-edge new ones–that might be iffy). Didn’t need a reboot because sound card drivers aren’t part of “the” kernel and don’t affect the OS itself (as they do in a monolithic setup like Windows); they are in a separate module. You know–the sensible approach. Okay…download’s finished, and let’s see whether I can get some sound. Not that I remember what I wanted sound for in the first fucking place…