Skills That Make You A Real Geek

   

1. Know Your Hardware

When it comes to hardware, you should be able to tell what's what, even the oldest and most obsolete chips make no difference to a nerd. In fact, we specialise in those. Well, that and finding the most out of date hardware from old equipment and putting them to good use in new ones.

2. Run All Your Essential Apps on a USB Stick

It is possible to install various apps on a thumb drive, but if you're a nerd, you would already know that. The rite of passage is in carrying around a thumb drive with all your apps in it, so you can access them and their settings from any computer.

3. Straighten the Pins on an Older CPU

When the pins of an old CPU or card have been bent, you probably throw it away. Not if you're a nerd. There are two simple tricks to realign these pins. The first is to run a credit card up and down through the rows of pins and the second is to take a mechanical pencil and realign them by sheating them in the pencil's tip. The first method works when the pins are lightly bent, while the second one works when the credit card trick fails.

4. Know the 13 Basic HTML Tags

to

-- Heading styles

-- New paragraph


or
-- Single line break

-- Hidden comment

---

-- Horizontal rule line

-- Bold text

-- Emphasise text

-- Strong emphasis

-- Italicise

-- Underline

  -- Non-Breaking space

-- Anchor a link

 -- Insert image

5. Get Through to Executive Customer Service

Nerds always get through to the executive customer service, somehow they always do. An average person doesn't know that there are ways to get around robotic customer service menus  (Gethuman.com). Moreover, when nothing works, they find and call the number to a company's corporate offices.

6. Beat Quake in Under an Hour

The art of speed runs is almost non-existent nowadays. Remember how people used to finish Quake in 15 minutes or less? That's a skill that makes you an alpha nerd.

7. Build a Hackintosh

You may not buy a Mac PC yourself, but you've tried out Apple's OS X platform, just to see if it lives up to the hype. Moreover, you may even have tried to build yourself your own custom assembled PC, which runs the OS X platform. In other word, built yourself a Hackintosh.

8. Watch TV Shows on the Internet (Legally!)

There are a number of websites out there, led by Hulu, which offer video streaming services, allowing you to watch popular shows online. A nerd would watch his or her shows online through these legal websites rather than committing piracy.

9. Get Around the Content Filter on Public Computers

Content restrictions on public computers never go well with you. You would much rather get around these restrictions and continue on with things that you want to do on the computer. The first option is to use a proxy website, but if that doesn't work, then you handy portable thumb drive comes into use. You would have a portable version of Firefox enabled with Tor installed in the thumb drive. Use that.

10. Recite pi to 23 Decimal Places

Here's what the value is. Memorise it.

3.141592653589793238462643

11. Replace the Controller Board on a Hard Drive

When hard drives go bust, replacing their Controller Board is often the way to fix them. In nerd land, this an essential skill, which keeps your data safe.

12. Benchmark Your Computer

Nerds are always working to improve hte performance of their PCs. But doing this is of no use or fun if one can not know how much the performance has improved. This is where Benchmarking software comes in.

13. Decorate Your Room Using Only Printer Paper

You know you can create your poster right? As long as you have a reasonably high resolution image, the website Rasterbator can turn it into a poster and you can print it out

14. Securely Erase Your Data So it Can't be Recovered

You erase your data securely, so that it can not be recovered. Face it, even though you know that it might get you into trouble, you have done it. You will go on a manufacturer's website and download the 'zero fill' software for your hard drive. Then you will delete whatever files you need to.

15. Get into a Windows Computer if you Forgot Your Password

Lost your Windows login password for your PC? Doesn't matter, you know there are ways to recover it. You can use a cracker, that is a software that cracks this password. In addition, you can also do some other things, like checking whether an admin account is present.