There have been plenty of articles about insecure IoT devices; Internet of Things security appears to be getting worse, not better. But it's not just the dangers associated with smart homes that put some people off, it's also the fact that they can needlessly complicate simple tasks.

A perfect example of this comes from the UK, where a man spent 11 hours attempting to make a cup of tea using his connected iKettle.

Big data specialist Mark Rittman's saga started at around 9 am when his device refused to cooperate, leaving him to debug the kettle - a sentence that perfectly encapsulates many people's fear of the future. He did boil some water the old fashioned way, but carried on trying to fix the problem.

Several hours later and Rittman still hadn't solved the issue, though he does now admit that assigning the kettle a static IP address rather than using DHCP would have been a better idea.

The problem is that the iKettle wouldn't integrate with Rittman's other smart products, such as his Amazon Echo, leading him to hack the device and add the functionality himself. But while it lacks IFTTT or Homekit integration, there is an API.

Eleven hours after his ordeal started, the software engineer finally got his kettle back online and responding to voice control, but his IoT problems hadn't ended: his connected lights started a firmware download, meaning he had to eat dinner in the dark.

Admittedly, this is a pretty extreme case; most people wouldn't be using a Python script to make their smart kettle work with IoT home hub devices. For his part, Rittman tweeted that the purpose of all this was "to create a real-world IoT event src for home IoT Hadoop project." But many questioned why he didn't just use a normal kettle.