Don’t underestimate that tech geek in the Weezer T-shirt and skinny jeans. He might look like a pushover at first glance, but inside he’s a seething mass of belly fire and competitiveness. He’s got the physique of a physicist, but the psyche of middle linebacker, and he’s intent on pushing his nerd skills to their natural limits.
In geek terms, this means making things, breaking things, and DIYing things to the hilt. It’s not just life hacking, it’s hardware hacking. It’s what tech nerds do best, and if you want to consider yourself a hardcore geek of the highest order, you’ll need to cross off every project in this list.
Disagree? Have a suggestion for a project we've missed? Please share your thoughts in a comment below.
Build a PC From Scratch
First things first. If you’re realizing your full potential as a hardware geek, you’re probably doing all your desktop computing on a dual-booting PC -- living in Windows for PC gaming and mainstream software support, and plumbing the depths of Linux for seedier exploits and world domination.
Sure, Macs are fine computers, but they’re not upgrade platforms. And they might be just a bit too, well, “pretty” for hardcore nerds.
So if you’re a tech guru of any experience and acclaim, you’re probably a PC user, and have
built a number of machines from scratch. You’ve seated motherboards, thermal-pasted processors, inserted memory sticks, slotted videocards, caged hard drives, connected power supplies, and loaded OSes into comfy little partitions.
You’ve also troubleshot everything described above, because PCs are cranky, and very few PC building projects successfully boot the first time around.
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com
