1) I decided to finally learn Arch, and I had the other two parts from my past adventures. I first updated Arch and then added the set of tools I thought would best work. These included: gcc, make, screen, and hexedit. (script to follow)
2) The reader itself is VERY basic. It's only four pins. Power, ground, a NOT(Enable), and the serial output at 2400 baud. Only three wires were needed on the GPIO:
1 X 2 X 3 X X X X X X X X 1: Usb 5V, 2: Ground, 3: Uart Rx
X X X X X X X X X X X X X
To "turn on" the reader you simply plug the NOT(Enable) into ground, I did this on my bread board. (See video)
3) To not reinvent the wheel I went with what I know for one direction, serial data capture: IntercepTTY. This is the lazy way since I invoke it to listen to a tty and I never have to set baud rates/partiy/etc, because it defaults to "listen in" to any and all activities on the selected tty. There are plenty of Uart/Serial/TTY readers out there, but I know the source is available and I wanted to run a mini project of porting x86 code to ARM