Today we went to Free Geek and picked up a Grant Box. It’s a pretty sweet computer, especially for the price ($0). We received the box through their hardware grant program. Here’s a little about Free Geek from their mission page:

“FREE GEEK is a 501(c)(3) not for profit community organization that recycles used technology to provide computers, education, internet access and job skills training to those in need in exchange for community service.”

The box came with Ubuntu GNU/Linux pre-installed, which is excellent because that’s what I’m running on my development box and on our new virtual private server (which now hosts our project tracker and soon will host a new version of the trip planner).

Our plan for the box is to use it for testing purposes (e.g., browser compatibility) and/or as a staging server before pushing new versions out to production.

Thanks, Free Geek!