{"id":256,"date":"2015-01-25T16:58:24","date_gmt":"2015-01-25T16:58:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/?p=256"},"modified":"2015-01-25T19:49:10","modified_gmt":"2015-01-25T19:49:10","slug":"investigating-the-internet-of-things-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/investigating-the-internet-of-things-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Investigating the Internet of Things: Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This weekend I have been reading the IEEE Computer Society&#8217;s Computer magazine that\u00a0was kindly offered as a free download via their Twitter feed:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"525\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">COMPUTER MAGAZINE: Reminder\/Download the first digital edition of 2015 for free! <a href=\"http:\/\/t.co\/I3xmEBeGuc\">http:\/\/t.co\/I3xmEBeGuc<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; IEEE Computer Society (@ComputerSociety) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ComputerSociety\/status\/558716170665488385?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">January 23, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Two articles in this publication particularly caught my attention: Firstly, Hal Berghel&#8217;s cases both for and against the magazine moving from print to purely digital delivery (p. 76), together with his vision for a radical reform of &#8220;cyberpublication&#8221;, inspired me to look at the way in which I keep track of\u00a0content that I have read, and\u00a0to think about ways in which I could better\u00a0make and retrieve notes related to this content.<\/p>\n<p>This\u00a0resulted in\u00a0me attempting to bring some order to the hotchpotch of\u00a0notes that have been created\u00a0in my OneNote over the years, and also to come up with a game plan for\u00a0creating and filing new notes in the future.<\/p>\n<p>While my plans to embed hyperlinks to webpages and downloaded content that has been neatly filed in my One Drive work well for digital artefacts, there is some difficulty in providing traceability between this new digital repository and\u00a0the physical books that I read. This is where the second article: Enabling the Internet of Things (p. 28) further stirred my imagination.<\/p>\n<p>In this piece, the authors provide a nice introduction to the technologies and strategies that are competing to become de facto standards in several key areas of the Internet of Things (IoT). This includes\u00a0a description\u00a0of three technologies that\u00a0allow physical things to be connected to the IoT: near-field communication (NFC) tags, quick response (QR) codes and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tags.<\/p>\n<p>Reading this introduction inspired me\u00a0to\u00a0create a printed bookmark containing a QR code linked to a\u00a0digital note.<\/p>\n<h2>My first IoT experiment<\/h2>\n<h3>Creating a\u00a0link to the digital note<\/h3>\n<p>Firstly I created a new note with the same title as my target book and attempted to obtain a web link to it. This was not actually possible using the current Windows Phone version of OneNote but was easily done\u00a0using the version on my Windows 8.1 tablet.<\/p>\n<p>The format that Microsoft have chosen for the link itself\u00a0however shows\u00a0little foresight into future uses for this feature.\u00a0The link includes the names of the notebook, the section and the note itself, meaning that if the note is renamed or moved later, the link will become broken.<\/p>\n<p>A better\u00a0method would have been\u00a0to provide a unique identifier for each note that is then decoupled from any user modifiable descriptions and locations.<\/p>\n<h3>Creating the QR code<\/h3>\n<p>A quick search on Bing led me to several sites offering the free creation of QR codes. For no reason in particular I chose\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.qrstuff.com\/%20\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/www.qrstuff.com\/<\/a>, which allowed me to paste in the URL for my note and then download the QR code as an image file.<\/p>\n<p>I then pasted this image into a bookmark and printed it out.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_264\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-264\" style=\"width: 2000px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/WP_20150125_001-1-e1422209612947.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-264\" src=\"https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/WP_20150125_001-1-e1422209612947.jpg\" alt=\"Bookmark with QR code link to OneNote\" width=\"2000\" height=\"2432\" srcset=\"https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/WP_20150125_001-1-e1422209612947.jpg 2000w, https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/WP_20150125_001-1-e1422209612947-247x300.jpg 247w, https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/WP_20150125_001-1-e1422209612947-842x1024.jpg 842w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 706px) 89vw, (max-width: 767px) 82vw, 740px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-264\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bookmark with QR code link to OneNote<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h3>Retrieving the link<\/h3>\n<p>Windows Phone comes with a built in QR code scanner known as Bing Vision which recognised the code without a problem. However rather frustratingly it is not possible to go directly\u00a0to a\u00a0note in the mobile version of the OneNote webpage, instead you are taken to the top level notebook and must then manually\u00a0locate and open the note itself. Even when setting Internet Explorer to view desktop rather than mobile versions of webpages, this problem remained.<\/p>\n<p>Windows 8.1 does not come with a built in QR code scanner so I paid a visit to the Store in which there were several options available, some free and others priced for around \u00a31.50. I opted for a free\u00a0application called &#8220;QR Code Scanner 8&#8221; which, although having some very annoying quirks such as forcing the tablet into landscape view, did manage to do its job.<\/p>\n<p>Scanning the QR code opened the correct note in the browser version of OneNote, with the option of then opening it in the native application.<\/p>\n<h2>Conclusion<\/h2>\n<p>While I did manage to connect a physical book to my Internet of Things using a bookmark with embedded QR code, the process left a lot to be desired.<\/p>\n<p>Firstly, the fragmentation of Windows devices means that\u00a0while some devices\u00a0come with native features, such as built in QR code\u00a0scanning functionality,\u00a0others don&#8217;t.\u00a0Furthermore two devices supposedly from the same family handle links to the OneNote web application completely differently.<\/p>\n<p>If there is such confusion between devices from the same manufacturer, I do not hold out much hope for interoperability between devices from different manufacturers.<\/p>\n<p>Secondly, and perhaps the biggest factor that will prevent me using this technology, is that it is tiresomely slow.<\/p>\n<p>Even with a relatively speedy connection, the OneNote web application takes several seconds to open. To add insult to this, the web application is only really acting as a &#8220;button&#8221; that launches the native OneNote program.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe a better solution to this problem would be to\u00a0use a NFC tag to directly launch OneNote. However these tags must be purchased, where as the beauty of the QR code is that\u00a0it can simply be printed.<\/p>\n<p>So it would appear\u00a0that we are not quite prepared for\u00a0the IoT just yet.\u00a0While some\u00a0tools and techniques are already available, the\u00a0current implementations\u00a0do not provide a seamless and pleasurable user experience.<\/p>\n<p>DW.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This weekend I have been reading the IEEE Computer Society&#8217;s Computer magazine that\u00a0was kindly offered as a free download via their Twitter feed: COMPUTER MAGAZINE: Reminder\/Download the first digital edition of 2015 for free! http:\/\/t.co\/I3xmEBeGuc &mdash; IEEE Computer Society (@ComputerSociety) January 23, 2015 Two articles in this publication particularly caught my attention: Firstly, Hal Berghel&#8217;s &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/investigating-the-internet-of-things-part-1\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Investigating the Internet of Things: Part 1&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[23,26,25],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-assorted-musings","tag-internet-of-things","tag-microsoft","tag-qr-code"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275,"href":"https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions\/275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawilson.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}