21 sure signs that you’re a geek

Are you a geek? If you’re asking the question, you probably are – curiosity is the defining characteristic of geeks. But here are 21 more signs that you might have the geek gene.

1. Even on a touchscreen device, you prefer to use a command line interface.
2. You secretly hope that GitHub is also a dating site.
3. You have more than one monitor on your desk.
4. ASCII art is too a real kind of art.
5. You modded your camera or smartphone by jailbreaking the firmware.
6. You say ‘Woot’ in everyday life.
7. Raspberry Pi is a computer not a desert
8. You know that a ‘kilo’ means 1024 and not a bag of groceries.
9. Did you play SimIsle or Azrael’s Tear?
10. You know that there are 10 types of people in the world; those who understand binary and those who don’t.
11. When nobody's looking, you hug your MacBook Air.
12. You can argue the merits of BBC Micro vs. Sinclair Spectrum with full recall of the specs.
13. You know what to do in a maze of twisty passages all alike.
14. You want to run a penetration test on your vintage Atari 800.
15. When you write, you write like a hacker (but you can also write for non-geeks).
16. You know what technology wants.
17. Geeky novelists are good novelists. For example, you read Charlie’s Diary and Charles Stross’s books.
18. You hate paper-based paperwork and embrace digital documents.
19. You work 9 to 5 but it’s at night (hat tip: Real programmers don’t use Pascal).
20. Your hero is Steve Wozniak not Steve Jobs.
21. You read The Nerd Handbook and realised it was about you.
22. Futurama FTW
23. You for one welcome our new alien overlords.

(Photo by James Pond on Unsplash)