OFFBEAT

Time to switch back to paper and harvest that suddenly valuable RAM

BORK!BORK!BORK! It's not all sunshine and Pastel de nata in Portugal. Behind the hundreds of ways of cooking fish and bottles of sweet, fortified wine lurks our old friend – a BIOS screen misbehaving in a window.

Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Mário in Lisbon, the digital sign looking out on the street from a branch of Banco CTT looks like it is in imminent danger of a storage failure. The "S.M.A.R.T. Status Bad" indicates that something has made the storage media (hard drive or SSD) unhappy, and Banco CTT should take a break from flogging financial services to replace the unit before it fails completely.

A jab of a key should allow the digital sign to continue doing its thing, and there is some computer hardware in the background that we're sure an enterprising Reg reader could plug into the screen to put it out of its misery – at least temporarily.

While we applaud Mário for his attentiveness, it is also worth noting that Lisbon is a lovely city with much to recommend – there is history to explore, cuisine to sample, and local culture to enjoy. This hack is a particular fan of the labyrinthine streets of Alfama, and the iconic trams are sufficient to satisfy anyone's inner public transport nerd.

Back to the bork.

Visible on the screen is the amount of memory installed. Four gigabytes, by the looks of things, which seems excessive for something that is probably only going to show a jumped-up slideshow to passersby.

Then again, considering the cost of RAM nowadays, that screen might be considerably more valuable today than it was only a few months ago. While we're not familiar with the financial products on offer from Banco CTT, we'd wager that few – if any – can keep up with the relentless rise in RAM prices.

It cannot be much longer before it makes more financial sense to replace digital signage with printed paper and harvest the suddenly valuable chips within, although where would that leave The Register's bork desk? ®