http://bossy1213.makes.org/goggles/bossy1213s-remix-of-mercedes-benz-slr-mclaren-722-s-ebay-

Have you heard about that amazing car from the future? Someone is selling it on eBay for a buttload of cash and supposedly it can be used to travel through time! I would love to have something like that, especially if it could also print food. Although, I would have to hit the lottery  a million times before I could afford that sweet vehicle. Oh well, I can’t wait to see everyone with it 15 years from now when it will be at a more affordable price. I mean, who would turn down a time traveling vehicle with a food printer and a vending machine?

For this four star assignment, I decided to go onto eBay and edit one of the items up for bid or for sale using  X-Ray Goggles. It was surprisingly easy because all you had to do was click a section of the page and you could edit it. I’ve done something similar in the past, but the way I did it took way longer than this method. My main reason for choosing car that could time travel was because for the recent Back to the Future day.

Below is an image of what pops up when you click on a section of a webpage when you have X-Ray Goggles activated. If you know HTML then you can do some deeper editing, but all you have to do is edit the black text.

Once you are finish editing, you can tap the “P” key to publish and upload your edited webpage for everyone to see! (As shown below)

Our mandatory challenge this week, worth four stars when the teacher told us it was worth five, involved manipulating the website of our choice to, more or less, fit our mood that day.

I started my assignment by taking Ms. Polack’s advice, and downloading the Mozilla X-Ray Goggles application onto my computer; to be more specific, I just bookmarked the actual program onto my Mozilla Firefox account. After that was done, I experimented with it just a bit, if only to see where everything fits; from there, it would all come down to finding the site I needed to remix.

I ultimately chose an article about a recent episode of NBC’s The Today Show, where Matt Lauer interviewed three cast members from the Back to the Future movies, in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of the original film’s theatrical release. For my remix, I kept the Lauer interview intact, but treated the events of the first film as if they actually happened, while hinting at the themes of the sequels.

Keeping that in mind, I decided to use two remixes for this project; the first one would give me a blueprint of the original site to work with, and the second one would be the one with my edited story. The end result was an abridgement of the events of the first film, without the less important, or more embarrassing additions, to the script; this includes the likes of Marty tricking Biff Tannen into driving his car into the back of a manure truck, or George telling Lorraine that she was his “density.”

When all is said and done, however, I think this was one of my better performances this semester, next to inventing a comedy-based Audio Assignment that’s all about the joys of mixing signals, while learning how Audacity works. I hope you enjoyed the first “Back to the Future Day” on October 21st, 2015, but like my article points out, the celebration’s not over yet.

Here’s the original site, and here’s the remixed version.

The assignment was to create a Pinterest board of your dream trip. I have always wanted to visit/live in Australia. So I made my Pinterest board about a trip around Australia. I figured I would probably travel around Australia when I live there for after grad (in an ideal world), so that would eliminate the main cost of getting over there and back, as well as vaccination needed. So I focused more on where I want to go and what I want to do. I also already had a Pinterest so all I had to do was create a board which I titled: DS106 Dream VayKay. This is what my board looks like:

Some of my pins were:

Top 25 things to do in Australia and New Zealand

From this post I really liked the Blue Mountains, the Great Ocean Road, the Sydney Opera House, dive the Great Barrier Reef, get up close and personal with animals, and cave of wonders. Most of the items on this list were also pinned on my board individually. Such as:

When I clicked on this picture I was directed to a website about the Wave Rock Festival held at this venue. The people who put on the Wave Rock Festival gave out personal and portable ashtrays in order to stop people from littering cigarette butts.

On top of all the cool places I found I also found a lot of fact sheets and travel tips. There were also tons of lists of where you should visit, what is only in Australia, etc.

Pinterest is a great source for cute ideas involving travel, fashion, cooking, basically anything and everything. However sometimes information gets misconstrued and you end up thinking an image is something when it’s just been falsely captioned so you have to check the webpage that is linked with the picture. With my Pinterest board I have my plans in tack for where I want to go, how I’m going to get there, and how to save money doing it. Here I come Australia… after I finish school and stuff.

For my second Web Assignment of the week, I decided to complete Google History Maps Story for 3 stars. This assignment asks you to tell the story of a literary or historical figure through Google Maps. The map itself, from its locations and directions should tell the story of the person/character you are talking about. It’s not a super complicated process, but I will give detailed instructions on how I created the Map below. I decided to tell the history of Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl killed in the concentration camps of Germany during World War II. Most of Anne Frank’s life is described through the popular diary that she kept which was later published in the United States after her death. I have always respected the great courage and sacrifice she gave as such a young woman in the concentration camps. Here is the map I created, detailing her life from birth to death in Nazi Germany. The green location is the starting point, Anne Frank’s birth, and the yellow location is the place of her death. The red locations represent different moments in her life. You can follow these different moments via the lines which are labeled Line 1, Line 2, etc. Each location also has a detailed description of what happened to Anne Frank at the time that she was in this location. By moving from one point to the next, you will get a story of the short-lived life of Anne Frank.

Here is how to complete the assignment:

1. Go to Google Maps.
2. Go to Menu—My Maps–Create Map
3. At this point, you can title your map what you please and give it a description.
4. Add locations to your map, documenting the life of the person you’ve chosen.
   • Search for the specific location in the search bar (e.g. “Frankfurt, Germany”).
   • After finding location, click Add to map.
   • Edit the title and description of the location, as well as the icon/symbol and color to desired setting.
   • Repeat step 4 until all desired locations are on the map.
5. Add lines to your map, connecting all of the locations.
   • Under the search bar, click on the symbol that looks like 3 dots connected by a line.
   • Start with the cursor on the first location in the timeline (e.g. “Birth”), and drag the line to the second location.
   • Press Enter on your keyboard. You will then be given the option to customize the appearance of the line as well as it’s title and description.
   • Repeat step 5 until all desired lines are on the map.
6. Drag your set locations and lines to the desired order via the left bar on the side. (I chose to place each line in between the separate events/locations.
7. Your map automatically saves, so at this point you’re done! Congratulations on creating your own Google Map!

www.boscoe.net/pokemon/

You’ve finally come of age. Today is your big day because it is the start of your journey as a Pokemon Trainer. You have to navigate through your house before you are able to get to the Professor’s house where you can finally get your first Pokemon! But wait, your childhood rival challenges you to battle with Pokemon! Can you win or will you ending up risking the life of your dear, new friend? Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that you are taking part in a Nuzlocke? So, if you lose, your Pokemon loses their life.

How did you like this piece of interactive fiction? Were you able to keep your Pokemon alive? If not, that is fine. I just enjoy creating these kind of stories since I’ve created them in the courses Electronic Literature and Games and Culture. On to the story itself, I decided to create a story involving Pokemon , but I wanted to combine the famous special set of rules called The Nuzlocke to give the story some more impact. The Nuzlocke is a special set of rules added to Pokemon games to make them  bit more challenging. When playing the Pokemon games with the Nuzlocke rules, when your Pokemon faints in battle, they are considered dead.

To create this three and half star assignment, I personally used Twine 1.4.1 that I already had on my computer for awhile now. There is a newer web based version that is easier to use if you want to try that out.

I used a bit more complicated coding to create this story, but to show you some of the basics, I created two “choices” and made them connect to other “Passages” by giving that Passage the Title of a choice. An example is shown below with what happens when you choose “Girl”.

I hope you guys enjoyed this short interactive fiction!

Isn’t an iPhone basically a pocket computer? It can do everything a computer can: type emails, browse facebook, make word documents…Why not fix up the web page to reflect this? (and change some of the jumble-y mess Apple puts in to describe it. Only basic necessities for descriptions here)

To do this, I first needed firefox (chrome, all the way). After downloading it, and downloading X-Ray Goggles, I had to decide which page I wanted to edit.

I am an avid apple fan. I watch live-blogs of the keynotes, every. single. time. I am thrilled that VZW now offers a yearly-upgrade plan because it means a new iPhone every time there is a new one.

Why not mess with it a little, get creative?

I pulled up the Apple iPhone site and got to work. I changed words around, mostly, but made it fit the theme I was going for. The most prevalent text was iphone, obviously, so I changed all those to Pocket Mac first. Then, I went through and changed some supporting texts (i.e., “accessories” to “gadgets and gizmos”). I published it, then realized the little carrots (“>”) showed up as errors in my published page. I went back, tried to change it, and the app crashed. Tried again after redoing all the work and, again, it crashed. So, third time’s the charm and here we have it.

The Pocket Mac 6s. Now available.