So I was considering buying that robot kit I posted about the other day. "Considering" because it's like a thousand bucks, and I'm not sure it's a thousand bucks worth of entertainment. Two fifty, surely, but a grand? But then I did some more poking around and hit the part of the assembly instructions that go, "Now download flargle.exe, connect to COM1 and diddle the flibbidy registers". So I emailed them, asking, "Really?" Turns out? "Yeah." Apparently the entire hobbyist-robotics industry assumes a substrate of Windows. What the hell guys.

So, now this is sounding less like "a fun 3d jigsaw puzzle to assemble! And when you're done, it walks!" and more like, "figure out how to get your Mac to run Windows (which it does not have) to talk to a serial port (which it does not have) to run UI software written by a hardware guy". Aside from the part of this that is clearly against Policy, this also sounds like a heaping dollop of Not Fun. In fact, my back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the entertainment value of this toy decreases by about $25 per minute spent screwing around with the serial port. It's hard to assign a value to time spent in Windows, because I'd have to be pretty heavily sedated to even consider that, so I imagine my sense of time would be skewed. Still, I think it's in the red before I even open the box.

Also! Apparently the robot's software is written in Excel! No, seriously.

Plus side to all this? We need not worry about Skynet.

I am, however, Jack's seething cybernetic disappointment.