Daily Archives: July 30, 2004

Hacking the Segway: Cool Link o’ the Day

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So, you’ve always wanted one of those dorky uber-cool Segway scooter things, but you don’t want to spend five grand on an electric scooter? There’s an answer for you!

Using off-the-shelf components and a little electronic know-how, you can build your own self-balancing scooter for a fraction of the cost of a real Segway unit. It makes me wonder, really, if there’s not a market for a gizmo like the Segway with a more reasonable price tag.

The only thing the prototype is missing is blue LEDs and maybe some spikes. Oh, and some barbed wire–it needs barbed wire. A Mad max version of a Segway just sounds like a lot of fun.

(Thanks to enoelie for the link…)

Oh, so THAT’S the problem…

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So I’m up beating my head against my Linux box, which I’ve been struggling with all evening. I have Samba and atalkd installed, but I can’t reach it from the Macs or the PCs in the house–can’t can’t can’t. i can see it, but I can’t log on…

I was heading to bed, about to concede defeat after four hours’ bloody struggle, when i had a flash of inspiration. Maybe I couldn’t log in because the …firewall …was …preventing …network …access?

Checked the firewall settings. The AFP and SMB ports were open. Nope, that’s not it…

…but what the hell, I’ll disable the firewall completely and see what happens.

Bingo.

Goddamn goddamn goddamn. Seems like when you tell Fedora Core 2 to open ports in the firewall, it doesn’t actually open the ports, it only says it does. (Err, mostly–it really did open the http and ssh ports, wtf?)

Well, there’s four hours of my life I’ll never have back. Fuck Linux in the ear with a jagged metal dildo, anyway. At least with Windows, you expect it not to work.

So anyway, it’s working, and I’m off to bed, with a weird sort of smug self-satisfaction at solving a problem I shouldn’t have had to solve in the first place.

Oh, and by the way… Apparently, I’m a strange attractor, whatever that means