13 ms·

We don’t need a remote-controlled iKettle

42 points by edward 11y ago

steckerbrett 11y ago
The teasmade was such a whimsical device, though I prefer the completely mechanical version which did everything from lighting a burner next to your bed to pouring boiling water hopefully into a cup. http://www.inoutfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Teasmade.jpg http://www.inoutfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Teasmad...
- cptnbob 11y ago
  Does it call 999/911 when it pours boiling water in your lap :)
cptnbob 11y ago
100% this. I haven't found a genuine IoT device that is useful. They always remind me of this scene from The Fifth Element: https://youtu.be/SnzzWGcdMqY https://youtu.be/SnzzWGcdMqY Literally ever device has dubious utility and security so far.
- kaolinite 11y ago
  Bathroom scales that log your weight to your health app automatically. Lights that dim when the movie starts. A front door that unlocks when you approach. None of these are necessary, obviously, but they offer little conveniences. An iKettle is pushing it a little, but honestly, I'd quite like to receive a tap on my wrist when the kettle has finished or my toast has popped up. There's plenty of utility to be had from IoT devices (although you're right about security being a concern) however, like remote controls and robotic vacuums, initially they are being dismissed as tools for the lazy. Soon I suspect they'll be part of everyone's lives.
  - steckerbrett 11y ago
    All of these things sound like solutions that will take me a lot longer to set up than they will save me in time. A few years ago I messed about with "smart" lighting, and it turns out that all of it just unimaginably annoying. All of these "easy" devices are going to have horrific security, some day there's going to be articles about a doorknob botnet or exploits running on shovels.
    - Profan 11y ago
      With this comment, that multi-functional Chinese army shovel becomes so much more sinister.
    - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
      Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/
  - aaron695 11y ago
    > Lights that dim when the movie starts. How does it know you want the lights dimmed? What if someone in the room is reading? This would be pretty high level AI. >A front door that unlocks when you approach. It has to know if you'll enter the house. What if you don't? It could lock it again, but then what if someone else left the house assuming it was unlocked. Now they could be locked out. These are hard problems to solve and more AI related.
    - chillingeffect 11y ago
      Exactly. One of the best things Joi Ito has done at the MIT Media Lab has been to shift the culture from "demo or die" to "deploy or die," because in that demo moment we are susceptible to the narrow and novel circumstances of the idea as performance.
  - krylon 11y ago
    > A front door that unlocks when you approach. Mmmh, what could possibly go wrong with that? I do not deny that there might be some useful applications for "IoT", but what I have heard / read about so far sounds mostly like solutions desperately looking for problems so everyone can ride the hype train. Given the numerous security issues we have seen on the Internet so far, I have serious doubts about hooking up everyday objects or critical infrastructure to the Internet just for the sake of a little convenience.
- pedalpete 11y ago
  I think it is the consumer IoT space which struggles for usefulness. In industry, IoT allows agriculture to use less water and get more yield, as well as monitoring civil infrastructure (roads, watermains, bridges, etc).
  - cptnbob 11y ago
    That's just embedded systems that have always been there though isn't it? Someone just stuck a marketing label on it.
    - collyw 11y ago
      "Big data" things used to be data warehousing. "Cloud based" used to be "web based". Maybe I a too old and cynical, but I rarely see genuinely new things, just rehashes of old things.
      - cptnbob 11y ago
        Yes. I think you've just been through a couple of cycles now like myself. Cynicism comes from watching the last disaster unfold :)
    - pedalpete 11y ago
      But embedded systems (as far as I know) weren't by default internet connected. They weren't easily merged with other APIs (again this may be my limited knowledge) to provide a more holistic vision of a system. They weren't easily accessible to be consumed as valuable data in real-time on phones. Yes, an embedded system could get the soil conditions on a farm, but what did it do with that data? How was it made available to an end user. So, I don't disagree that embedded systems have been in existence for a long time, but I think what we're seeing is the equivalent of moving from Compuserve to the WWW, and I think at the time, many people would have said that all the world-wide web was doing was making the information available through Compuserve's forums and networks distributed. But in reality, it was the early stages of a massive sea-change in how the technology is used.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  Consumer IoT in its current form is mostly a product of the O'Reilly Hype Machine - the machine that gave the world Web 2.0. I get some use out of remote heating control. My hours are variable, so a dumb timer isn't ideal. Lighting and the rest I have no interest in. Useful consumer IoT is going to have to wait for useful consumer robotics, and that's 10-20 years away.
  - XorNot 11y ago
    Consumer IoT is too expensive, not useless. Everything it can't do is a metric of the fact that computing on that scale actually isn't cheap enough. Light control for example: people don't want to spend the $thousands it would cost to make it practical (i.e. every light in your house control) when the most common use-case it would solve is leaving your house and going "oh, I left the lights on - but click!". That's worth maybe $10 a light to me, not $70. Which in turn implies the wi-fi, compute and power has to cost cents, not dollars in the product.
    - weland 11y ago
      The associated problem is the blown-up featuritis required to somehow make up for the price. I would be extremely happy to shed out 70$ for a way to turn off the lights when I forget them (cynically, I'd say especially if it lasts long enough to save me 70$ in electricity bills, but I'm sure a reasonably convincing argument can be made about the environment, additional comfort and so on). The problem is that virtually every available offering right now attempts to do a lot more than that to justify the 70$ price tag. It also does it disastrously bad, and without any meaningful integration behind a single manufacturer's product range (there are few things more hilarious than looking at a bunch of Z-Wave or Zigbee devices from different manufacturers trying to talk to each other). Instead of giving me a simple on-off gizmo, I get a crawling smartphone app that needs a frickin' cloud infrastructure behind it and pushes HTTP notifications to something that could literally be made out of a dozen transistors if it didn't need to talk HTTP (or at least out of a cheap-ass microcontroller with a dumb hardware PHY, but because IPv4 won't fucking die already we either need to make them talk HTTP or have people toy with their routers). When I get downstairs and notice the lights are still on, it takes me less time to find my keys, run back upstairs, fix me a glass of Old Fashioned, gulp it, go back downstairs, notice I forgot why I went up in the first place, so go back up again and turn off the light, than it takes me to open the fucking application, wait for the authentication messages to go back and forth between me, the lights that are literally five meters away from me and some datacenter in frickin' Texas, and turn off the light after I finally get to the relevant stupid dashboard that seemingly shows every possible control in the world except for the on/off button. All because -- if all it did was shown an on/off button -- it would seem way too expensive. It's bitterly impossible not to remark that everyone seems to try putting out the fire with the sword. The whole tech stack is currently way too complex and burdening to manufacture these things cheaply. The logic thing to do would be to make it leaner. Yet instead, everyone seems to be trying to get chips to talk JavaScript now.
- wisty 11y ago
  I suppose a camera in a fridge would be handy, so you could have a peek at whether you were out of milk. I believe there was a similar product, but you had to swipe product barcodes, to maintain a database. But I'm not the kind of person who keeps a database of the contents of my fridge, which might be why I'm the kind of person who forgets to buy milk. My heuristic for coming up with that idea - when's the last time I called home, and ask someone to perform a simple task. Pet food dispensers might be another one. I guess a remote kill switch for irons, ovens, etc could be useful.
  - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
    And then someone prevents you from running said oven until you pay them a ransom. (Or just starts turning on peoples irons at random, if it can turn them on as well) I personally think the security implications outweigh the potential benefits for most IoT devices. It's too bad, because the potential benefits are generally nice. (And the other side is: I have no desire to "buy" a device that can have features remotely removed. It's why I ditched Windows, it's why I won't ever buy a Tesla or an iPhone, it's why I don't have any recent game consoles. And most IoT devices fall into this category. Among other reasons, it creates a perverse incentive for a company to break (intentionally or unintentionally) older models (or allow them to fall into disrepair) so that people will upgrade to this year's model.)
octatoan 11y ago
See "much needed gap". Also, RFC 2324, "Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)". [1]. [1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324
jwdunne 11y ago
Yeah, a remote control iKettle sounds meh but a remote-control iKettle controlled by your iContact Lense, with the water fetched by a robot (can't be called iRobot unfortunately) sounds so much cooler. To be honest, I used to want all of these things. What's changed my mind is that for every bit of money that comes into my life, hours of my life have been traded in some way. Why would I give up life hours for a gadget who's novelty will wear off within days when I'm perfectly able to fill a kettle or flick a light switch? Takes 2 mins. I do think there are applications to providing independence to those less able. That's an important area to look into.
- hippo8 11y ago
  > remote-control iKettle controlled by your iContact Lense, with the water fetched by a robot Now that's a wonderful thought. This kettle sounds silly when I consider it in isolation, but if it was used along with other products which would then help automate an entire process that is just something I would throw my money at. I mean come on, a "water boiling path finding tea making robot", doesn’t sound so bad :p
- rwmj 11y ago
  If you've got a robot that can fetch water, pretty much all other problems are solved. Particularly if it can understand a limited set of spoken commands like "make me a cup of tea". Of course it could go horribly wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAswvg60FnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAswvg60FnY
  - astazangasta 11y ago
    I favor Cheesoid: http://youtu.be/GzzOw2tmb3A http://youtu.be/GzzOw2tmb3A
snitzr 11y ago
I can't remember who said it, but a customer buying a shovel is actually buying a hole. The customer doesn't care about the shovel he / she cares about solving a problem.
- trumpete 11y ago
  Marketing and Strategy 101
- arjie 11y ago
  Dan Norman, in The Design of Everyday Things, quotes Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt as saying "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!". Googling now, the quotation seems rather famous on its own.
  - nsns 11y ago
    But wouldn't this quote only be true if said drill self-destructed after a single use?
    - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
      Perhaps a better quote would be "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want (a) quarter-inch hole(s)!"
  - ZeroGravitas 11y ago
    Great book (It's Don Norman BTW, rather than Dan), though thinking about the quote now, presumably the purchaser doesn't actually want a quarter-inch hole for its own properties, but has some further goal in mind that the hole lets them achieve and could peaked be achieved better without requiring a hole or a drill.
    - arjie 11y ago
      Funny about the name. I picked it up off my shelf to confirm the quote and got the author wrong. Amusing. In the book, Norman says exactly the same thing. That people are looking for something to achieve some goal, and the hole and, consequently, drill are just means to that end. Of course the spirit of the quotation is different. It means "serve the ultimate goal, not the task chosen to achieve that goal", so it encompasses this with some degree of rhetorical flourish.
tragomaskhalos 11y ago
I would never dare to remotely activate my kettle, as I would never be sure enough that there was water in it. Nice nostalgia for the Teasmade though - the simpler more tea-obsessed Britain of my youth, before the invasion of US coffee chains, harking back to the war, when British troops would even brew tea under fire to get their 'fix'
- Frondo 11y ago
  I imagine a remote-controlled kettle could detect the water level, and simply disengage (or even send back a warning!) if there were insufficient water.
  - tragomaskhalos 11y ago
    You're right, and actually the article says that now I re-read it. Still no sale though !
    - StavrosK 11y ago
      Does your username really mean goat-armpit-guy?
  - Shivetya 11y ago
    even perhaps have a simple connection to the water line similar to how refrigerators usually do for their ice makers.
  - evilduck 11y ago
    Or just add a thermostat. If the temperature goes above boiling, turn off the heating element.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- chrisseaton 11y ago
  If there's a lull in battle today it's still appropriate to get a brew on. If your platoon is in reserve, you're in cover, and it's cold then definitely get a brew on. It's good admin to be warm and hydrated, and with something like a jet boil you can be done in 2 minutes.
jstsch 11y ago
Like the article says, get a Quooker - by far my most used kitchen appliance. Also good for your health to have an instant cup of tea always available.
- ZeroGravitas 11y ago
  I don't drink hot drinks myself, but I did look into a boiling water tap when refitting my kitchen. They win on usability, though not on efficiency, since they keep a pot of boiling water stored at all times in a insulated container. Presumably this could be improved by connecting them to the internet and having them turn off when your Nest knows your house is empty, or your fitbit knows your asleep, but start to raise the temp as people enter the house or kitchen. They could also connect to a smart grid and vary the stored heat within some parameters to help balance the grid (kettle boiling contributed to some of the biggest grid peaks in the UK, during advert breaks in popular television events).
coldcode 11y ago
I heard that British tanks in WW2 came with a kettle for making tea. It might be just a story but having British relatives it makes sense.
- arethuza 11y ago
  "Boiling vessels" have been a key component of most UK armoured vehicles since late in WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_vessel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_vessel
reefab 11y ago
From the article's footnotes: > While on the subject of smartphone driven hardware, experience has shown me that software has a much shorter mean-time-to-obsolescence than hardware. Any gizmo that needs an app to make it work will have the service life of a bluebottle, as Apple’s planned obsolescence orphans the app with an iOS upgrade. This has been my experience too and I wish manufacturers would remove the requirement on having an app to use/configure the device. Because of that, I try to make sure that such devices I design provides a basic web interface that makes it possible to setup and use the device. This is impossible or at least difficult if the device is powered by a 8-bit MCU but with the dropping prices of beefier MCU and linux-compatible SoC this shouldn't be an issue in the future. Of course, there is also the issue of remote services that those devices often depends on, even if it's not exactly necessary sometimes.

42 points by edward 11y ago

The teasmade was such a whimsical device, though I prefer the completely mechanical version which did everything from lighting a burner next to your bed to pouring boiling water hopefully into a cup. http://www.inoutfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Teasmade.jpg http://www.inoutfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Teasmad...

cptnbob 11y ago
Does it call 999/911 when it pours boiling water in your lap :)

cptnbob 11y ago

100% this. I haven't found a genuine IoT device that is useful. They always remind me of this scene from The Fifth Element: https://youtu.be/SnzzWGcdMqY https://youtu.be/SnzzWGcdMqY Literally ever device has dubious utility and security so far.

kaolinite 11y ago
Bathroom scales that log your weight to your health app automatically. Lights that dim when the movie starts. A front door that unlocks when you approach. None of these are necessary, obviously, but they offer little conveniences. An iKettle is pushing it a little, but honestly, I'd quite like to receive a tap on my wrist when the kettle has finished or my toast has popped up. There's plenty of utility to be had from IoT devices (although you're right about security being a concern) however, like remote controls and robotic vacuums, initially they are being dismissed as tools for the lazy. Soon I suspect they'll be part of everyone's lives.
- steckerbrett 11y ago
  All of these things sound like solutions that will take me a lot longer to set up than they will save me in time. A few years ago I messed about with "smart" lighting, and it turns out that all of it just unimaginably annoying. All of these "easy" devices are going to have horrific security, some day there's going to be articles about a doorknob botnet or exploits running on shovels.
  - Profan 11y ago
    With this comment, that multi-functional Chinese army shovel becomes so much more sinister.
  - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
    Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/
- aaron695 11y ago
  > Lights that dim when the movie starts. How does it know you want the lights dimmed? What if someone in the room is reading? This would be pretty high level AI. >A front door that unlocks when you approach. It has to know if you'll enter the house. What if you don't? It could lock it again, but then what if someone else left the house assuming it was unlocked. Now they could be locked out. These are hard problems to solve and more AI related.
  - chillingeffect 11y ago
    Exactly. One of the best things Joi Ito has done at the MIT Media Lab has been to shift the culture from "demo or die" to "deploy or die," because in that demo moment we are susceptible to the narrow and novel circumstances of the idea as performance.
- krylon 11y ago
  > A front door that unlocks when you approach. Mmmh, what could possibly go wrong with that? I do not deny that there might be some useful applications for "IoT", but what I have heard / read about so far sounds mostly like solutions desperately looking for problems so everyone can ride the hype train. Given the numerous security issues we have seen on the Internet so far, I have serious doubts about hooking up everyday objects or critical infrastructure to the Internet just for the sake of a little convenience.
pedalpete 11y ago
I think it is the consumer IoT space which struggles for usefulness. In industry, IoT allows agriculture to use less water and get more yield, as well as monitoring civil infrastructure (roads, watermains, bridges, etc).
- cptnbob 11y ago
  That's just embedded systems that have always been there though isn't it? Someone just stuck a marketing label on it.
  - collyw 11y ago
    "Big data" things used to be data warehousing. "Cloud based" used to be "web based". Maybe I a too old and cynical, but I rarely see genuinely new things, just rehashes of old things.
    - cptnbob 11y ago
      Yes. I think you've just been through a couple of cycles now like myself. Cynicism comes from watching the last disaster unfold :)
  - pedalpete 11y ago
    But embedded systems (as far as I know) weren't by default internet connected. They weren't easily merged with other APIs (again this may be my limited knowledge) to provide a more holistic vision of a system. They weren't easily accessible to be consumed as valuable data in real-time on phones. Yes, an embedded system could get the soil conditions on a farm, but what did it do with that data? How was it made available to an end user. So, I don't disagree that embedded systems have been in existence for a long time, but I think what we're seeing is the equivalent of moving from Compuserve to the WWW, and I think at the time, many people would have said that all the world-wide web was doing was making the information available through Compuserve's forums and networks distributed. But in reality, it was the early stages of a massive sea-change in how the technology is used.
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
Consumer IoT in its current form is mostly a product of the O'Reilly Hype Machine - the machine that gave the world Web 2.0. I get some use out of remote heating control. My hours are variable, so a dumb timer isn't ideal. Lighting and the rest I have no interest in. Useful consumer IoT is going to have to wait for useful consumer robotics, and that's 10-20 years away.
- XorNot 11y ago
  Consumer IoT is too expensive, not useless. Everything it can't do is a metric of the fact that computing on that scale actually isn't cheap enough. Light control for example: people don't want to spend the $thousands it would cost to make it practical (i.e. every light in your house control) when the most common use-case it would solve is leaving your house and going "oh, I left the lights on - but click!". That's worth maybe $10 a light to me, not $70. Which in turn implies the wi-fi, compute and power has to cost cents, not dollars in the product.
  - weland 11y ago
    The associated problem is the blown-up featuritis required to somehow make up for the price. I would be extremely happy to shed out 70$ for a way to turn off the lights when I forget them (cynically, I'd say especially if it lasts long enough to save me 70$ in electricity bills, but I'm sure a reasonably convincing argument can be made about the environment, additional comfort and so on). The problem is that virtually every available offering right now attempts to do a lot more than that to justify the 70$ price tag. It also does it disastrously bad, and without any meaningful integration behind a single manufacturer's product range (there are few things more hilarious than looking at a bunch of Z-Wave or Zigbee devices from different manufacturers trying to talk to each other). Instead of giving me a simple on-off gizmo, I get a crawling smartphone app that needs a frickin' cloud infrastructure behind it and pushes HTTP notifications to something that could literally be made out of a dozen transistors if it didn't need to talk HTTP (or at least out of a cheap-ass microcontroller with a dumb hardware PHY, but because IPv4 won't fucking die already we either need to make them talk HTTP or have people toy with their routers). When I get downstairs and notice the lights are still on, it takes me less time to find my keys, run back upstairs, fix me a glass of Old Fashioned, gulp it, go back downstairs, notice I forgot why I went up in the first place, so go back up again and turn off the light, than it takes me to open the fucking application, wait for the authentication messages to go back and forth between me, the lights that are literally five meters away from me and some datacenter in frickin' Texas, and turn off the light after I finally get to the relevant stupid dashboard that seemingly shows every possible control in the world except for the on/off button. All because -- if all it did was shown an on/off button -- it would seem way too expensive. It's bitterly impossible not to remark that everyone seems to try putting out the fire with the sword. The whole tech stack is currently way too complex and burdening to manufacture these things cheaply. The logic thing to do would be to make it leaner. Yet instead, everyone seems to be trying to get chips to talk JavaScript now.
wisty 11y ago
I suppose a camera in a fridge would be handy, so you could have a peek at whether you were out of milk. I believe there was a similar product, but you had to swipe product barcodes, to maintain a database. But I'm not the kind of person who keeps a database of the contents of my fridge, which might be why I'm the kind of person who forgets to buy milk. My heuristic for coming up with that idea - when's the last time I called home, and ask someone to perform a simple task. Pet food dispensers might be another one. I guess a remote kill switch for irons, ovens, etc could be useful.
- TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
  And then someone prevents you from running said oven until you pay them a ransom. (Or just starts turning on peoples irons at random, if it can turn them on as well) I personally think the security implications outweigh the potential benefits for most IoT devices. It's too bad, because the potential benefits are generally nice. (And the other side is: I have no desire to "buy" a device that can have features remotely removed. It's why I ditched Windows, it's why I won't ever buy a Tesla or an iPhone, it's why I don't have any recent game consoles. And most IoT devices fall into this category. Among other reasons, it creates a perverse incentive for a company to break (intentionally or unintentionally) older models (or allow them to fall into disrepair) so that people will upgrade to this year's model.)

octatoan 11y ago

See "much needed gap". Also, RFC 2324, "Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)". [1]. [1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324

jwdunne 11y ago

Yeah, a remote control iKettle sounds meh but a remote-control iKettle controlled by your iContact Lense, with the water fetched by a robot (can't be called iRobot unfortunately) sounds so much cooler. To be honest, I used to want all of these things. What's changed my mind is that for every bit of money that comes into my life, hours of my life have been traded in some way. Why would I give up life hours for a gadget who's novelty will wear off within days when I'm perfectly able to fill a kettle or flick a light switch? Takes 2 mins. I do think there are applications to providing independence to those less able. That's an important area to look into.

hippo8 11y ago
> remote-control iKettle controlled by your iContact Lense, with the water fetched by a robot Now that's a wonderful thought. This kettle sounds silly when I consider it in isolation, but if it was used along with other products which would then help automate an entire process that is just something I would throw my money at. I mean come on, a "water boiling path finding tea making robot", doesn’t sound so bad :p
rwmj 11y ago
If you've got a robot that can fetch water, pretty much all other problems are solved. Particularly if it can understand a limited set of spoken commands like "make me a cup of tea". Of course it could go horribly wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAswvg60FnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAswvg60FnY
- astazangasta 11y ago
  I favor Cheesoid: http://youtu.be/GzzOw2tmb3A http://youtu.be/GzzOw2tmb3A

snitzr 11y ago

I can't remember who said it, but a customer buying a shovel is actually buying a hole. The customer doesn't care about the shovel he / she cares about solving a problem.

trumpete 11y ago
Marketing and Strategy 101
arjie 11y ago
Dan Norman, in The Design of Everyday Things, quotes Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt as saying "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!". Googling now, the quotation seems rather famous on its own.
- nsns 11y ago
  But wouldn't this quote only be true if said drill self-destructed after a single use?
  - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
    Perhaps a better quote would be "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want (a) quarter-inch hole(s)!"
- ZeroGravitas 11y ago
  Great book (It's Don Norman BTW, rather than Dan), though thinking about the quote now, presumably the purchaser doesn't actually want a quarter-inch hole for its own properties, but has some further goal in mind that the hole lets them achieve and could peaked be achieved better without requiring a hole or a drill.
  - arjie 11y ago
    Funny about the name. I picked it up off my shelf to confirm the quote and got the author wrong. Amusing. In the book, Norman says exactly the same thing. That people are looking for something to achieve some goal, and the hole and, consequently, drill are just means to that end. Of course the spirit of the quotation is different. It means "serve the ultimate goal, not the task chosen to achieve that goal", so it encompasses this with some degree of rhetorical flourish.

tragomaskhalos 11y ago

I would never dare to remotely activate my kettle, as I would never be sure enough that there was water in it. Nice nostalgia for the Teasmade though - the simpler more tea-obsessed Britain of my youth, before the invasion of US coffee chains, harking back to the war, when British troops would even brew tea under fire to get their 'fix'

Frondo 11y ago
I imagine a remote-controlled kettle could detect the water level, and simply disengage (or even send back a warning!) if there were insufficient water.
- tragomaskhalos 11y ago
  You're right, and actually the article says that now I re-read it. Still no sale though !
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    Does your username really mean goat-armpit-guy?
- Shivetya 11y ago
  even perhaps have a simple connection to the water line similar to how refrigerators usually do for their ice makers.
- evilduck 11y ago
  Or just add a thermostat. If the temperature goes above boiling, turn off the heating element.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
chrisseaton 11y ago
If there's a lull in battle today it's still appropriate to get a brew on. If your platoon is in reserve, you're in cover, and it's cold then definitely get a brew on. It's good admin to be warm and hydrated, and with something like a jet boil you can be done in 2 minutes.

jstsch 11y ago

Like the article says, get a Quooker - by far my most used kitchen appliance. Also good for your health to have an instant cup of tea always available.

ZeroGravitas 11y ago
I don't drink hot drinks myself, but I did look into a boiling water tap when refitting my kitchen. They win on usability, though not on efficiency, since they keep a pot of boiling water stored at all times in a insulated container. Presumably this could be improved by connecting them to the internet and having them turn off when your Nest knows your house is empty, or your fitbit knows your asleep, but start to raise the temp as people enter the house or kitchen. They could also connect to a smart grid and vary the stored heat within some parameters to help balance the grid (kettle boiling contributed to some of the biggest grid peaks in the UK, during advert breaks in popular television events).

coldcode 11y ago

I heard that British tanks in WW2 came with a kettle for making tea. It might be just a story but having British relatives it makes sense.

arethuza 11y ago
"Boiling vessels" have been a key component of most UK armoured vehicles since late in WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_vessel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_vessel

reefab 11y ago

From the article's footnotes: > While on the subject of smartphone driven hardware, experience has shown me that software has a much shorter mean-time-to-obsolescence than hardware. Any gizmo that needs an app to make it work will have the service life of a bluebottle, as Apple’s planned obsolescence orphans the app with an iOS upgrade. This has been my experience too and I wish manufacturers would remove the requirement on having an app to use/configure the device. Because of that, I try to make sure that such devices I design provides a basic web interface that makes it possible to setup and use the device. This is impossible or at least difficult if the device is powered by a 8-bit MCU but with the dropping prices of beefier MCU and linux-compatible SoC this shouldn't be an issue in the future. Of course, there is also the issue of remote services that those devices often depends on, even if it's not exactly necessary sometimes.