So the other night I was working out, which affords me (probably too much) time to think to myself about things. For some reason, I started thinking about building an embedded device. I've been extremely interested in portable/embedded computing devices of all types (media players, cell phone, Internet devices, PDAs, etc). I started thinking about what goes into it, and realized, I knew next to nothing about it. I've built lots of computers, but really that's just getting a bunch of parts and putting them in the right spot. Really, there is no difference with embedded devices, you could just as easily do the same thing, the one limitation being that there really are no standard parts out there, at least from the standpoint of a consumer. While many people buy parts and put a computer together, by and large, when talking about a portable or embedded device, it means that you are buying a packaged product (think iPod).

I figured I would post this little workaround for a problem I had with the wireless chipset on a Dell laptop, in case it was of use to anyone else (or for my own reference in the future).

Over the weekend, I wiped Windows Vista off of a family member's laptop. The reasoning for this was that some of the hardware was not working properly, which I attributed to driver issues on Vista. The wireless Internet connection was dropping in and out sporadically, the USB speakers were having playback issues (popping, skipping, etc.) and the power options (suspend, hibernate, etc.) were not working properly all the time (well-known issue with Vista). I don't know Vista well enough to support it just in my head over the phone (having myself moved to Ubuntu many months ago), so I decided to install Windows XP, in the hopes of fixing the aforementioned issues, and for my own benefit in trying to support it on future occasions.

Before we get into the rest of this discussion, I would like to qualify that if you are not interested in the Big Ten Conference, especially in relation to football or basketball, this discussion probably will not directly interest you (though perhaps it will, I hope that it does). For those that do not know, the Big Ten Conference has created a video network that aims at capturing most of the sporting events for the conference, and making them available on a new television channel, called "The Big Ten Network". In their own words:

"The Big Ten Network is an exciting new television network that the Big Ten Conference launched August 30, 2007 to nationally promote a wide array of Big Ten sports and academic programming, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year."

This is a two-for-one news deal today. The first commentary is on AMD's announcement of taking steps forward in allowing open-source development of drivers for their hardware platform. The second commentary is my story of how I almost (but ultimately didn't) buy an iPhone today, and why that came to be.