Since I am a technology enthusiast, I tend to be an early adopter and thus, I hit on bugs that other people may or may not see. Since I already write about the random bugs I hit, I'm going to give such postings a name: the Computers Are Magic series.
Computers Are Magic, part 1: audio whine. On Ubuntu 10.10, it seems that when I play a single stream of audio, there is this high-pitched whine that I hear over whatever it is I'm supposed to hear. The addition of a second playing audio stream makes the whine go away, even if the second stream is completely silent. I believe this to be a Pulseaudio bug - no such whine is present when I play straight to the ALSA device. The upshot of this is that I can add or remove whine to my audio playback by pausing or unpausing a muted audio stream. This should have you thinking "Wait, WHAT?"
Sidenote: I finally figured out what the title of Lennart Poettering's blog means. TBFKAYIBYNYAANB = The Blog Formerly Known As "Yes, I Broke Your Network, Your Audio, And Your Boot." Why? Lennart wrote Avahi, PulseAudio, and systemd.
You know you're on Berkeley Time when you arrive in the classroom one minute after your class's official starting time and find one other student and zero professors. Good times.