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English Man Spends 11 Hours Trying To Make Cup of Tea With Wi-Fi Kettle (theguardian.com)
All data specialist Mark Rittman wanted was a cup of tea from his all new Wi-Fi kettle. Little did he know that the thing would take 11 hours for that. The issue, in the case of Rittman was, that the base station was not able to communicate with the kettle itself. According to The Guardian: A key problem seemed to be that Rittman's kettle didn't come with software that would easily allow integration with other devices in his home, including Amazon Echo, which, like Apple's Siri, allows users to tell connected smart devices what to do. So Rittman was trying to build the integration functionality himself. Then, after 11 hours, a breakthrough: the kettle started responding to voice control.
The worst part was the liquid it ended up producing was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
Probably interference from the Bluetooth Pot
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
We passed the point of "useful" and onto "making pointless shit then trying to get people to buy it".
Engineers, who value rationality, increasingly use the get-out clause of any bright man in a broken system that has overreached itself - just following (employers') orders - to evade the fact that their work is pointless junk.
THE FUTURE IS STUPID.
Man buys IoT kettle that doesn't have support for Amazon Echo, spends 11 hours coding support, puts lame spin on story because nobody cares.
Does it correctly implement RFC2324 and respond 418 I'm a teapot when asked to brew coffee?
Seriously? I'm not sure what has me more gobsmacked - the fact that somebody would make a WiFi kettle, or the fact that anybody would actually BUY the fucking thing and burn 11 hours of his life trying to make it work. "Yes, I willingly wasted 11 hours of time, plus however much time I had to work to pay for it, on a kettle, just so I could connect it to the Interwebs! Isn't that cool?"
Soon we'll be hearing stories about people being DDOS'd and spammed by their own appliances, and I will laugh heartily.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
The inevitable question asked IoT tinkerers is : what's the point? Was it worth it? After three weeks of tinkering, and an ugly mess of arduinos, breadboards and wires, Now you can hit the snooze button on your analog clock with wifi, or now you can run ssh on a teletype machine. Why did you do it?
The answer is usually : to see if I could.
And I say God bless those nutters.
He took eleven hours to explain the history of the British East India tea company to his kettle?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is actually really cool and good. Everyone seems to be mocking the wifi teakettle but what they're not realizing is this is the move to home automation expanding and growing. This is a good thing.
Ever see Star Trek? When Picard went to a replicator and said 'Earl Grey Tea, hot' and poof, tea came out? Well, this is basically what we're trying to recreate, just without the fancy deconstructing and reconstructing things on the atomic level.
As we automate more things in our lives it leaves us more time to pursue other activities. This is one of the ways civilization is going to advance.
Shouldda got a Galaxy Note 7. Heats up shit quick.
Table-ized A.I.
... I would have gone and bought another kettle and then spent those 11 hours on some other pursuit.
It is a bit involved. try here
It didn't take him 11 hours of trying to randomly get it to work, it took 11 hours of complex system integration effort to make something do something it didn't already do. Duh. I spent at least that much time on enabling remote control of my garage door from my Android phone. That doesn't mean it takes me hours to close or open my door from my phone; it takes seconds, at most. But making it work took hours... so that I could do it in seconds from my phone.
Hmm. Clearly I need to figure out how to integrate with Google Assistant so I can do it by voice...
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I thought he was trying to use WiFi EMF to heat water! Disappointed.
Yeah... I think I see your problem. Perhaps get it to work before trying to do anything clever.
Unless the WiFi kettle can turn my phone, or wifi PC into a tea dispensing entity, I don't want it. It would be nice to have a tea button on my phone that pours freshly brewed tea out the headphone jack... ... obviously this wouldn't work with an iPhone.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It just didn't have the right list of synonyms to parse the command "HEAT F*CKING WATER YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF SH*T!!!"
This is more hidden marketing for the Amazon Echo. Just stop it. No one wants to buy the Echo.
....his kettle will produce coffee tomorrow morning.
To paraphrase Thomas J Watson "I think there is a world market for about twenty Saturn rockets."
And that's not just counting the Saturn Vs.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I suspect the problem is that the kettle is RFC 2324 compliant, and was returning a 418 error.
No worries -- I hear they're working on a firmware update to make the kettle RFC 7168 compliant, which should make integration much easier.
Yaz
You don't hit a nail with a screwdriver. Microwaves, my friend. They work much better for heating up things including food on occasion.
We'll make great pets
this is the move to home automation expanding and growing
It's not home automation at all.
You still have to go to the kettle, and fill it with water. You still have to stop what you are doing to brew your tea. You still have to find a clean cup to put the tea in.
REAL home automation would know when you want a drink. It would make it for you. It would deliver it to you (where ever you are in the house) and pick up the dirty cup afterwards, wash it and stack it back in the cupboard.
This is just being a slave to your gadgets.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"Sounds like a case of the port not calling the kettle back." Well done, AlabasterCodefy, well done.
Because I haven't seen this posted yet: https://xkcd.com/1319/
in a microwave. 'nuff said.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Sure, it sounds ridiculous to spend 11 hours to make a cup of tea, but in the end he obtained tea by solving a more general problem. This opens up entirely new, previously unimagined possibilities. For example now he can tell it to make him a cup of tea when he's physically situated on the other side of the world.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Nice "no true Scotsman" there.
Oh, and I'm sure the kettle only holds a single cup of tea worth of water, not like they make kettles that heat 1.5L+ water right? I mean that would be insane! you could reboil the water multiple times a day without having to refill it, and whoever heard of THAT?
When is the last time you have heard about a new technology that just sprang up 100% fully formed and functional? Home automation is still in its infancy, of course it isn't going to do every little niggling thing for you.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
A key problem seemed to be that Rittman's kettle didn't come with software that would easily allow integration with other devices in his home...
He was expecting interchangeability with third-party devices? Lock-in and proprietary communications is what the IoT is all about!
Did he keep the no tea so he could open the screening door when he had the tea?
Infocom games had the best graphics. Everything was exactly as I imagined it!
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
How did he stay awake to work on the thing to get it to make tea to keep him awake in the first place?
"Hmmm this is going to take a while" he said. "I'd better start a kettle". He turned on the gas and snapped the grill lighter hastily, as the electric ignition on the stove had not worked in years. This had been at least part of his motive for acquiring the new tech in the first place. "Now I can get to work", he muttered...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
And yet, the final result was still better than the substance that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea that he could have gotten from a Sirius Cybernetics synthesizer.
-Z
Which is why the intelligent tea drinker has a boiling water tap installed, that produces hot water on demand with no delay and no waste.
To be fair it's probably a little less efficient than a kettle, but only if you assume that all of the water in a kettle will be immediately used.
It's a waste of energy and time to boil a full kettle when you only need a cup.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it