Why wouldn't you buy a Wi-Fi kettle? It seems so useful: wake up, grab your phone and get a brew started before you've even got out of bed. That's the idea. But it wasn't what Mark Rittman experienced when he spent 11 hours trying to get his internet kettle to boil in a gripping battle with the future.Rittman, a data analyst, was trying to set up his Smarter iKettle, a £99.99 (about R1800) appliance controlled by a smartphone app that can also check how much water is in it."Hanging around the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil is a thing of the past," the retailer's website chirps. "The iKettle will save you over two days a year."Shortly before 9am Rittman said he attempted to boil the kettle but was hampered by a forced-debugging, which caused its base station to reset.Several hours later the kettle's base station appeared unable to connect with the kettle itself.In the analogue world, this is solved with a simple electrical connection but that is far too basic for the hyperconnected modern gadget: it must interact wirelessly.Shortly after 11am, and although the kettle appeared to have found the network, its base station reset, forcing Rittman to recalibrate it.It turned out the kettle hadn't connected at all.Just after midnight Rittman posted a video of what he had wanted all along: to turn the kettle on. ..