Data Specialist Spends All Day Getting 'Smart' Kettle to Work

English data specialist Mark Rittman just wanted hot water for his 9am tea, but one thing led to another and it wasn't until dinnertime that he managed to fully diagnose the problem with his WiFi-enabled "smart" kettle, hack a workaround, and use voice control to tell his kettle to boil water, reports the Guardian. Meanwhile, he'd been detailing his epic travails on Twitter, because that's what data specialists do.

Unfortunately, his tweets technically disrupted his progress because, as he wrote, "The Hadoop cluster in garage is going nuts due to RT to @internetofshit, saturating network + blocking MQTT integration with Amazon Echo." In other words, he'd attracted too much attention to his plight and it was slowing him down. By the time he finally solved the issues, he was eating supper in the dark because, as he wrote, his lights were downloading a firmware update. Lesson learned? Many commenters and Gizmodo have weighed in, and the verdict is: "Go analog, baby." Now if you'll excuse Rittman, he's got a full day of work to catch up on. (Have you heard of the smart tampon?)