50 Skills Every Real Geek Should Have
Posted 12/08/08 at 12:00:00 PM by The Maximum PC Staff
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Decorate Your Room Using Only Printer Paper
Some people might think that decorating a room requires a trip to Crate and Barrel and an open line of credit, but if you’re a real nerd you know better. You know that you can get all your decorating done with nothing more than a printer and some paper.
To cover your walls, you don’t need fancy stuff like “artwork,” or even real posters, all you need is the Rasterbator. Find a reasonably high-res image, and the Rasterbator will blow it up and split it into single-page-sized chunks for you to tape together. However, if you want your poster to be one contiguous image, be prepared to spend some time with a ruler and razorblade trimming off the white borders.
If your shelves are feeling a little barren, it might be time to fill them up with a little papercraft. Assuming you’ve been on the internet over the last couple years, you’re probably aware of the general idea behind papercraft—you print out a template and fold it, origami-style, into a little paper model. What you might not have known is that it’s easy to create your own papercraft templates. So get to it!
Securely Erase Your Data So it Can't be Recovered
When you format your disk, most of the data it contains is not actually deleted. Rather, the disk space that it occupies is made inaccessible and overwriteable by the file system. Until it is actually overwritten, the data on the formatted disk is still recoverable by anyone with the right tools. If you want to more thoroughly destroy your data (without destroying your hard disk) you’ll want to perform a “zero fill,” an operation which overwrites a pattern of 0s over all the bits in the hard disk.
Most hard disk manufacturers offer some sort of drivers on their website which will allow you to zero fill your drive. These drivers are the most reliable option, but if you can’t find them, there’s also free apps such as killdisk, which should do the job on any hard disk.
There is some theoretical chance that magnetic remanence could allow someone to recover data from a zeroed drive, but it’s such longshot that you’re better off not wasting money on software that promises to overwrite your drive some ridiculous number of times.
Get into a Windows Computer if you Forgot Your Password
So, you managed to lose the password to your Windows account. How screwed are you? If you’re a true nerd, not very. There are a couple of things you can do to try and recover your password.
First, if you haven’t changed the default settings on your Windows install (which you should have) you may be able to log into an unprotected administrator account by starting the PC up in safe mode. To do this, press f8 as the computer boots up. If you can get into the system in this mode, you can reset other user’s passwords by clicking the “User Accounts” icon in the control panel.
If that doesn’t work, your best bet it to attempt to crack the password using a cracker like ophcrack loaded onto a bootable CD, floppy or USB drive.
Hide Porn from Your Significant Other
Want to keep your forays into the internet’s seedier spots unnoticed by your spouse? No problem. For most users, enabling a simple feature like FireFox or Safari’s “private browsing” feature will do the trick. These features make it so that your browser temporarily stops storing any information about your activities on the web, meaning that your wife won’t get any nasty surprises the next day when Google autocompletes her search to something obscene. If you absolutely must store files to your computer that you don’t want anyone else to know about, use a thumb drive (they’re dirt cheap these days) and hide it in your sock drawer or something.
However, if you’re dating an FBI agent, or are just absurdly paranoid, there are more secure solutions. You could just encrypt all the illicit data, but then you might have to face questions like “Honey, why is there a password-protect .rar file sitting on the desktop?”
To get around this, hide your data steganographically. That is to say hide it inside another file. You might have seen this technique used on the internet (say, as part of an ARG) to hide a picture inside of an audio clip, for instance, but it can also be used to hide larger amounts of data. Using the open source app TrueCrypt, you can create an encrypted disk of any size inside of an inconspicuous-looking file.
Explain What E=MC^2 Means to a Liberal Arts Major
Sure, you know what it means. The mass-energy equivalence is Einstein’s most famous revelation and the key to his theory of special relativity. But that’s all mumbo jumbo to a Liberal Arts major, who’d rather sing sonnets than study science. Hence the challenge of explaining this famous equation in layman’s terms. Defining the variables (E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light in a vacuum) may be easy enough, but getting someone to wrap their heads around the concept of how those relate will take lots of patience and even some creativity. Our tip: speak in their language (poetry or song), and do it over a glass of merlot. Or two.
Haha! Its official I am a
Submitted by sandra34 on Mon, 11/16/2009 - 3:18am
Haha! Its official I am a real geek cos I have done all of those! :)
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Submitted by punksnot19 on Sat, 12/20/2008 - 12:58pm
What about nunchuck skills? Chicks like guys with nunchuck skills...
Submitted by adeletwo6789 on Tue, 09/29/2009 - 11:20am
wow…nice dress up! Well I can only
identify the superman, batman, and the Spiderman… may be my 6 yearsassignment | assignment
help | assignment
writingold nephew will able to identify all of the characters. He is always.
Submitted by martin0641 on Tue, 02/24/2009 - 6:53pm
Not only were the 'Chux ignored, but all 50 of your "skillz" were childsplay for me. Please hire some real editors who do more than spit out dribble for script kiddies that wanna think their 1337.
Real IT is hard, avoiding outages, perfecting performance, operating at the Enterprise level, satisfying customers who don't care what kind of array your using.
I don't expect much since your money comes from load-spewing teenagers, but the occassional recognition of the people who actually know what their doing would be nice.
Also, this is 2009, everyone can read leetspeak. It's not cool anymore, get over it.
Try and offer a real how-to every once and awhile as well. People know how to o/c videocards, see if they can perfect failover on 50 servers 100 miles apart.
Submitted by Antoros on Fri, 02/27/2009 - 10:50pm
You are skilled at IT work and yet you consistently make two of the most basic mistakes in written English. Please proofread before you post arrogant messages.
Ya i agrree with you dew is
Submitted by TheKhaos24 on Thu, 12/18/2008 - 7:33pm
Ya i agrree with you dew is the best. I just wanted to let you know you can hide your files quite easily for free all you have to do is open up system tools and alt code everything that is what i do
Submitted by EyesSewnShut on Wed, 12/17/2008 - 3:27am
Both Señior Pibb and Dr. Pepper suck. Real nerds and geeks alike drink the DEW!
Do the DEW
Submitted by Glycerin on Wed, 12/31/2008 - 5:21pm
Thank you at least someone agrees with me!
Seriously, who still uses IE?
Submitted by AndyYankee17 on Fri, 12/19/2008 - 5:24pm
yeah because nerds and geeks don't need the sperm count anyways
I count this as a waste of space.....
Submitted by ghot on Wed, 12/17/2008 - 2:18am
You publish a magazine that is supposed to report on computer hardware and software and do it fairly and reliably.....quit wasting space with this cr*p. Oh yeah, add to that the wonderfully enlightening screwdriver article....like anyone can't buy a screwdriver without direction.
Submitted by gordonjc on Mon, 12/15/2008 - 2:57pm
i only count 46, not 50
Submitted by Silentblaze513 on Mon, 12/15/2008 - 4:17am
There's about 80% more yet to be said in this article
Submitted by sixbit on Wed, 12/10/2008 - 7:43am
lame article....
Submitted by sixbit on Wed, 12/10/2008 - 7:42am
lame article....
The hyperlink for Portable
Submitted by yugiah on Wed, 12/10/2008 - 6:51am
The hyperlink for Portable apps aint there :P Fix pl0x?
Submitted by okoureia on Tue, 12/09/2008 - 10:43am
I can't wait to get off of work so I can try tinkering around with that virtual machine.
Submitted by AndyYankee17 on Tue, 12/09/2008 - 12:41pm
I don't know which one they mention in the article but my favorite is Sun's Virtual box
Submitted by that Linux guy on Tue, 12/09/2008 - 8:13am
Best... Article... Ever.
Submitted by Sharkky9 on Tue, 12/09/2008 - 3:23am
I would like to point out that this article misuses the phrase "liberal arts." Liberal Arts are those pursuits which are not applied. For example, Physics, English, and Mathematics are all liberal arts. What this article is trying to say, is that any good geek should be able to explain relativity to, for example, a humanities major. Subjects in the humanities include english, philosophy, religion, and history.
As a liberal arts major(mathematics) i am proud to note that understanding of general and special relativity is an important part of my curriculum.
Sincerely,
A Pretentious SOB
Submitted by anonuser on Tue, 12/09/2008 - 6:35am
Gadzooks, you're right. I never knew, theoretical physics IS a liberal art. Also, you didn't make any spelling mistakes in your post, AND you were the first commenter. Nice job, fellow geek!
Submitted by steventhebrave on Tue, 12/09/2008 - 2:39am
NT Pass Reset is a bootable CD for resetting windows passwords. You should give that a go before trying a crack CD.
Submitted by MAJORzer0 on Wed, 12/17/2008 - 5:04am
You never realize how easy it really is to crack XP. We have a few different tools here at the office to force our ways on simple minded computers. A good (or bad depending on how you look at it) thing is that alot of old programs still work just as well on a fully updated XP. We don't have to deal with VISTA though so I don't know how well any of my tools will work. Alot of them are unix/linux based programs that simply open up and attach itself to your OS and let you change anything you want(even the registry and master boot record of your hard drives). It keeps the button mashers here from totally killing us on reloading the machines because they played with something they shouldn't have.
Submitted by Boogster on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 8:15pm
I only built one computer four years ago (this one). And even then I had to read up on it for six months beforehand. This shit fascinates me though. The little bit I've learned has helped me a great deal where I work as some of the CNC machinery I use has been retrofitted with PC Controls (replacing punched tape readers). It's pretty cool.
Submitted by Queenof1 on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 3:14pm
I'm pretty disappointed that MPC would mention mooching of neighbor's wifi. Whereas needing to crack a Windows password for YOUR system that you can no longer get into is valid, there is no reason to steal bandwidth from your neighbor, even if they aren't geek enough to secure their network.
Pitcher's ERA? Please...
Submitted by DelandSIV on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 12:26pm
I'll take your pitcher's earned run average, and raise you a quarterback's passer rating.
Submitted by AndyYankee17 on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 12:40pm
yeah that's what I was thinking, ERA's simple, real geeks can compute pass ratings to 4 significant digits.
mentally.
official
Submitted by GreenTurtle on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 12:14pm
It's official..... I am a geek.
Submitted by G33k on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 8:57am
Hey, i'm the real geek! i have A+, Net+ Linux+, and i'm doing ccna. I run 64-bit ubuntu on my laptop ( with 32-bit skype ).
GEEK FTW!
Submitted by killerxx7 on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 7:47am
This is def a geek list not that much maths involved lol
Submitted by lostcause64 on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 7:51am
The only difference between a Geek and a Nerd is that Geeks have at least occassional intimate contact with members of the opposite sex. Having done most of these things myself already, and being a grandfather of three, leaving this a Geek list is very important!!
John
Try to be smarter than the object you're working with! It will make things easier, and might just save your life...
Submitted by Digital-Storm on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 3:50am
Change the title from Real Geek to Uber Nerd. Please!
Exactly, I agree with you.
Submitted by maniacm0nk3y on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 7:09am
Exactly, I agree with you.
Submitted by scuzzo on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 12:43am
In order of the pictures is it
DDR Memory
Dual Channel RIMM
PCI Express Connector
Nicely done!
Submitted by willsmith on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 11:16am
Nicely done!
Nice article.
Submitted by dankers on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 12:31am
Nice article.
Submitted by yugiah on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 12:05am
Quite the list :o
Submitted by maniacm0nk3y on Sun, 12/07/2008 - 11:57pm
Half of these I have already did but most are useless to me.
I probably will get another moniter when I get a degree for web design. I will be building a linux media center, checked it on my laptop (and checking off a number here by having a dual boot) soon. Everything else is not for me.
Well done...
Submitted by horzo on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 12:42pm
Let me know when you find a Linux app that:
a) does transcoding
b) is DLNA compatible
c) is free
Submitted by pRtkL xLr8r on Tue, 12/09/2008 - 1:55pm
I have it running on Gentoo Linux and can now share my hi-def movies from my Linux box to my Xbox 360 and PS3...
Submitted by anonuser on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 10:36pm
Oh you mean like Fuppes?
http://fuppes.ulrich-voelkel.de/
Submitted by chat1der on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 6:07am
Submitted by maniacm0nk3y on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 7:08am
Why?
* Edit: Oh so I have a syntax error and maybe some grammatical errors as well. I wrote this at 2.am after finishing a program (final) that is for class the next day(which is today).
Even the stuff that is useless should be standard for any new techie. All of this should be standard, they should have included more "high profile" skills. When I hear about this over and over it seems that it should just be the norm.
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