No Audio

I don't listen to music while I work or have speakers plugged into my computer. When I was a lad there was about a one in three chance after rebooting my computer that the audio would work, and I just lived with it. If I really wanted to watch a video I could reboot and pray or maybe charge up my battery dead brick of a phone, but it was enough resistance to keep me from getting distracted and I got used to being content without music.

I recently found what was up with it when I wanted to record some screencasts of my day to day typing with voice control. The default audio device was randomly being selected from the speaker, the headphone jack on my microphone and a mystical sound card. All I needed to do was select my speaker by looking at aplay -l and exporting the environment variable ALSA_CARD accordingly (in my case export ALSA_CARD=PCH).

Now I just keep the speaker unplugged because it has a huge plug that gets way too hot and because audio is for the unsophisticated.