NOTE: The following is an editorial.
You see the tabs at the top of our site? There are geeks for every one of them (except "About Us" and "RSS/Atom," of course). The header would need to be a mile long to cover all of the types of geeks that there actually are. "A geek is one who isn’t satisfied knowing only the surface facts, but instead has a visceral desire to learn everything possible about a particular subject" according to Arrow Webzine. Therefore, there may be knitting geeks, sandwich geeks, lingerie geeks or plumbing geeks. Most would probably concede that computer geeks are the O.G.s (Original Geeks *slaps knee* I joke. I keeed).
Arrow Webzine listed 71 top things anyone calling themselves a geek should know. It was fascinating and quite useful for catchall geeks, who want to fine-tune their computer knowledge in possibly criminal ways.
Let's start off with a couple of the lame ones. Most of my beef with the lame ones is that they're just too pedestrian. Perhaps I'm myopic or I know a bunch of geeks, but most people I know could easily do the following six things.
#47 How to Mod a Flash Drive Case
Anyone from the HGTV network could probably pull this off. It shouldn't even be on the list.
#37 Tethering a Smartphone
Seriously? That's not even hard!
#34 How to unlock an iPhone
Why would any serious geek want an iPhone? They don't even have removable media and the storage options are laughable. It has no file system. You have to sync everything through iTunes. No flash? Cute device, though.
#9 Monitor Network Traffic
My mom could do this before she passed away. Is this seriously a geek requirement?
#15 Rip Streaming Videos
Again. Cake.
#32 Who Mulder and Scully Are
You are not a geek just because you watched X-Files.
These are some of the ones I'm proudly able to do (in addition to the ones listed under lame):
#7 Hide a file behind a JPEG – It's so necessary
#8 Crack a Wifi Password – In my sleep
#10 Recover Master Boot Record – Fun story.
#18 Find a Website IP Address Without Web/Command Prompt Access
#20 Screw With WiFi Leeches – Our home wireless is set to only allow specified machines in.
#21 Hexadecimal and Binary Number systems – I got bored a lot in high school
#22 How to Hot Wire a Car
#25 Running an Operating System from a USB Thumb Drive – Okay, technically, I was running one from an external hard drive, but I'm going to give myself credit for this one. 😉
#31 Use a Camera in Manual Mode
#38 Wiring a Home Theater System
#0 The meaning of the following acronyms:
USB, GPU, CPU, ATA, SATA, HTML, HTTP, FTP and P2P
#41 Unleash a Laser Pointer's Full Potential – Those were fun times frying resistors at at Chapman University. Good times.
#53 Setting up a VPN
There are more, but let's move on. This list is getting long.
Here are a couple of the ones I found useful:
#23 Increase Wifi Range – Learn about that here.
#71 Fake Name Generator – Found here
[Source: Arrow Webzine]
