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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.
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.
Shouldda got a Galaxy Note 7. Heats up shit quick.
Table-ized A.I.
Depends on your point of view. If you're a customer, the point of a pod is to make you a cup of coffee. But in Keurig's eyes, the point of a pod was never to make coffee, it was always to make a profit on each pod sold.
However, third parties figured out how to make pods, too, and none of them paid Keurig royalties for doing so. This upset Keurig greatly. So they came out with Keurig 2.0, with a built-in Genuine Keurig Pod Detector (an LED and photo transistor that detects Keurig's invisible ink printed on the pod's foil top.) This invisible ink thwarted the evil third parties pods by reporting to the coffee maker's owner that "no valid Keurig pod was detected". This of course made all the coffee drinkers go back to buying Genuine Keurig Pods, making Keurig profits go up again.
Except it didn't. The day after they came out, enterprising coffee drinkers figured out this nonsense and simply taped an old Keurig label onto the detector, and continued using their third party pods. Some third party pod makers provided a free clip-on reflector printed with the invisible ink that fit over the detector. And all the blogs were atwitter with the Evil that Keurig had wrought with Keurig 2.0. The demise of the company was predicted, buckets of tar and feathers were gathered, and the peasants grabbed their pitchforks and torches.
Except that didn't happen either. Most people got on with their morning coffee, Keurig looked stupid for a while, and the whole tempest in a teapot blew over.
John