We’re all waiting for the day when the promise of a smart home is eventually fulfilled, but there’s no denying that sometimes smart appliances are anything but.
Mark Rittman, a data specialist in Hove, England, wasted his whole day trying to make a damn cup of tea using his new Wi-Fi kettle.
Rittman started around 9am, but quickly ran into trouble.
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Three hours later, he still hadn’t figured out how to connect his Amazon Echo to the kettle itself.
3 hrs later and still no tea. Mandatory recalibration caused wifi base-station reset, now port-scanning network to find where kettle is now. pic.twitter.com/TRQLuLzLpx
All of the attention he received on Twitter was not only distracting, but it was apparently saturating his network.
Now the Hadoop cluster in garage is going nuts due to RT to @internetofshit, saturating network + blocking MQTT integration with Amazon Echo pic.twitter.com/ryd42c5ewj
Now my wifi kettle is basically taking the p*ss. Told me it had found network, now you need to recalibrate me, oh btw I didn’t rly connect pic.twitter.com/WbGsIrzBio
Part of the issue was that the kettle apparently didn’t really have any software of instructions help with the integration, so he had to hack something together himself.
It is, and OK apart from flaky WiFi connectivity; main issue is that there’s no IFTTT or HomeKit integration, so hacked that together myself https://t.co/0IjD7q4wzM
Well the kettle is back online and responding to voice control, but now we’re eating dinner in dark while lights download a firmware update pic.twitter.com/yPTDoUkM9Z
Austin Powell is the former managing editor of the Daily Dot. His work focuses on the intersection of entertainment and technology. He previously served as a music columnist for the Austin Chronicle and is the co-author of The Austin Chronicle Music Anthology.