The 50 Skills Every Geek Should Have

1. Install a hard drive in a laptop 2. Perform a clean OS install on a machine with two OSes 3. Swap out the battery on your iPod/iPhone 4. Jailbreak an iPhone 5. Wire your house for Ethernet and Coax cable 6. Use BitTorrent and RSS to automatically download new shows from trackers 7. Use an A/V receiver to its fullest capability (every port is taken) 8. Calibrate an HDTV without the manual 9. Use a DSLR in full manual mode 10. Hack the encryption and mooch your neighbour's Wi-Fi 11. Solder cleanly enough to get around a circuit board 12. Use your 3G phone as a Wi-Fi access point 13. Shove the guts of a modern game console into a retro game console 14. Design a webpage in HTML by hand that features a picture of your cat 15. Use Photoshop to imperceptibly doctor a photo 16. Abstain from buying extended warranties 17. Know where to buy cheap cables and accessories 18. Fix your parents' computer over the phone without looking at a computer 19. Enter the Konami code 20. Comment on Gizmodo from your phone 21. Type quickly using T9 texting 22. Program a universal remote 23. Contribute code to the Linux kernel 24. Hide porn from your significant other 25. Avoid DRM on everything 26. Know how to back up your data to networked storage—and actually do it 27. Watch TV shows on the internet for free 28. Edit together digital video ripped from YouTube 29. Play any SNES game on your computer through an emulator 30. Reset expired trial software by messing with the registry 31. Hackintosh your PC 32. Download pre-release movies from Usenet 33. Hack the Wii to play homebrew games 34. Get around web content filters on public computers 35. Get into a Windows computer if you forgot your password 36. Securely erase your data so it can't be recovered 37. Share a printer between a Mac and a PC on a network 38. Build a fighting robot 39. Write your own Firefox plugins 40. Navigate and reorganise the files on your computer in DOS 41. Get something on the front page of Digg 42. Get through to executive customer service 43. Rip a CD to V0 quality MP3s 44. Rip a DVD to DivX 45. Build your own computer from parts 46. Swap out the hard drive in your DVR for a bigger one 47. Get an NES cartridge working again by blowing in it 48. Calibrate a 7.1 surround-sound system 49. Play downloaded games on a Nintendo DS 50. Talk about things that aren't tech related For the source and more on the list, please take the time to visit: Gizmodo Australia