Geeks . . . make the world go round

So, the other day I'm wandering around Torgeson Hall (Torg) here at VT, and this odd looking card reader outside the Configurable Computing Lab catches my eye. Since it's the Computer Science building, nearly every door in Torg has a card reader or a fingerprint scanner, but this is different. First, it's in a hard carved cherry box. . . and it's scrolling the news. I watch for a few moments and realize that it's running an RSS feed of Slashdot, Digg, BBC, and CNN.

It ends up that a friend works in the lab, and he tells me that this was a spare time project. The backend is an old 486 running debian.

Geeks. . . can't live without 'em.