That we are living in an age where technology has transcended everything and blurred any boundaries such that tech products are essentially lifestyle products has never been in doubt. That, however, you can fumble around with a smart Wi-Fi-connected tea kettle for 11 straight hours just to get it doing the obvious thanks to a variety of technical reasons, is still hilarious to us.
But that is exactly what happened to British data scientist Mark Rittman. And he live-tweeted it, because, 2016!
Like every other normal tea making process, you still get to do the basics because water + tea + sugar (optional for some) = the tea you want. But if your smart connected devices are acting up and the network they’re connected to also seems to be on one of those days, it could be a long morning and, eventually, a long day without the most British thing ever, tea.
https://twitter.com/markrittman/status/785751015517814784
Then you have to do a lot of troubleshooting
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
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
In the process, your other connected devices decide they can’t take it any more and just follow the tea kettle to the garage
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
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
The kettle just plays hard to get
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
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
Making us all non-tech people wonder, why does the kettle need to be online anyway? Can’t it just make tea like the others without needing to be connected to a network? Is it because it is lonely and needs company?
Then the tea kettle stopped throwing tantrums and came back online and there was world peace for a moment. Then Rittman’s other connected devices, this time his lights, decided to download a firmware update. Yes, your home light bulbs taking a break as they, well, get an update (before your Android does 🙂 ). What is that even?
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
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
Oh, and just incase you think we’ve plucked this Rittman story from thin air or an Isaac Asimov science fiction novel, here’s some proof that we didn’t from none other than Rittman himself
.@Nephentur Just in case anyone is thinks I'm nuts, purpose of all this is to create a real-world IoT event src for home IoT Hadoop project pic.twitter.com/WEwH5biBGd
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
And more proof for the doubting Thomases
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
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how to make tea in 2016
My work is done. And now onto everything else I meant to do today, after that first cup of tea. pic.twitter.com/bJPuJ85TCT
— Mark Rittman (@markrittman) October 11, 2016
But couldn’t all of this have been avoided if he just got a [curse word] normal kettle? I mean, who wants to go through all that trouble just to make a cuppa? We agree, it’s no ordinary cup of tea.
The Internet of Things (IoT) you keep reading about here on Techweez and elsewhere is very real. The smart home is here to stay and while it may still not be as user friendly as we may want (this story of Mark Rittman is a good example because you shouldn’t need a Computer Science background just to be able to make tea no matter what), it’s just a matter of very short time before it does. Welcome to the connected future, world!
