In April 2005 I joined the Free Software Foundation Europe and received my membership smartcard. The card looked impressive but wasn’t very interesting without a smartcard reader. So (at last) I have bought a reader (SCM Microsystems SCR335) so I can use the card with GnuPG.
To get the reader working I started to follow the mail GnuPG smartcard howto, but I soon noticed that the udev rules provided in that document were ugly: the rules called a script that changed group ownership and permissions on the device file; udev can do that without a script. So I made up my own rule that looked like this:
BUS=="usb", SYSFS{product}=="SCR33x USB Smart Card Reader", GROUP="staff"
That changes the group ownership of the device to “staff”, which is one of the groups I’m in. After stopping and starting udev I was able to use gpg to check the card status.