Being a geek or a nerd is all about what you do and don\’t do. It doesn\’t matter what the tag, knowing your way around technology, especially computers is a rite of passage. Here\’s are a few things that are generally accepted \’geeky\’ skills to have!
![\"Computer](\"http://iamjayakumars.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/geek-gif.gif\")
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 Well, that and finding the most out of date hardware from old equipment and putting them to good use in new ones.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
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 (try 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 the 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.
Source http://www.efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=140915