So Cooking Oil IS Flammable

An three-foot high blaze while frying your breakfast is a sure way to jumpstart your day (but maybe not the best way). I was reading the newspaper after putting the pan on low heat and let it heat for a while. I then decided to add some oil because the ham didn't look it had any fat in it, and FWOOM!

So I stood there expecting the flames to die down but they didn't, so I tried to douse it with a cup of water, and FWOOOOM!

Too bad, no pictures though.

Getting Rid of Crackling with Soundblaster Live

My Soundblaster Live 5.1 SE recently developed a crackling problem after more than two years of flawless performance. It produces random loud buzzes and crackles when playing music with high bass or games with loud gunshots and explosions. There were only three solutions available (or at least what Google can find):

1. Update sound card drivers. We're out of luck as driver support died out years ago. This might help however, if you're still using the drivers from the CD or if you're using Linux.
2. Replace the card in another PCI slot. Apparently this fixes an IRQ conflict, or moving it away from the PSU which is "generating interference" (not confirmed). This didn't work for me.
   
3. Turn down hardware acceleration. This worked, but then you could no longer use EAX and I'm afraid the CPU would be needed to compensate for the card's loss of acceleration. Not yet confirmed; this is based on onboard sound consuming CPU cycles, and those don't have hardware acceleration.

What did work for me, I set the bass and treble levels to 50% in the sound card controls (volume has always been at 50%). I then rely on the media player and speakers to increase the bass and treble. Try this out and hopefully it will also work for you.