Does anyone know either how to get ead~ to work,

The original is from the "creb" external library, which is installable via deken.

or a reasonable workaround using something different
that is actually installable?

Otherwise there are the vanilla implementations of [c_ead] in rjlib (https://github.com/rjdj/rjlib) and [c_ear] in rc-patches (https://github.com/danomatika/rc-patches).

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Dan Wilcox