Stunchicken - Slashdot User

Living In Tokyo's Capsule Hotels 269

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday January 05, 2010 @05:34PM from the living-in-the-hive dept.

afabbro writes "Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 once offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home. Now with Japan enduring its worst recession since World War II, it is becoming an affordable option for people with nowhere else to go. The Hotel 510’s capsules are only 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide. Guests must keep possessions, like shirts and shaving cream, in lockers outside of the capsules. Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas says, 'It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep. You get used to it.'”

Star Guard — an Old-School Platformer Done Right 107

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 10, 2009 @12:12PM from the 39-deaths-i-am-terrible dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Rock, Paper, Shotgun points out a new game called Star Guard, a Flash-based platformer for Mac and PC that's a throwback to the early days of computer gaming, yet still entertaining. They describe it thus: 'Its greatest strength, to my mind, is throwing out the old-school traditions of difficulty. It does certainly get tricky, requiring the platformer standbys of carefully timed jumps and learning enemy patterns — there's something of a Metroid vibe to it. But you don't get punished for failing to meet one of its challenges — you're just plunged a few feet back to most recent checkpoint, and carry on. Lives are not finite, but the small mound of green pixels that mark your corpses are a maudlin testament to your ineptitude. However, death is useful — I ritually found myself sending in a suicide spaceman, taking out an enemy or a mine so that the path was clear for my next go. ... However, it doesn't leave people who pride themselves on their gaming skill, and demand their games to be hard, out in the cold. At the end of each level, your score alters dramatically depending on how many times you died.'"

Comment Re:a far future - carry your presence not your pho (Score 1) 220

by Stunchicken on Thursday August 20, 2009 @09:42PM (#29142081) Attached to: Speculating On the Far Future of Cellphones

It may not be such a far future as you imagine.

I recently swapped my trusty old Nokia N95 for a shiny new HTC Magic running Android. Android is closely tied to many of Googles services (mail, calendars, contacts) and within the remit of those I can either edit on the phone screen or login at any convenient computer with a net connection and make use of the bigger screen and keyboard. It's all automatically and pretty much instantly synchronised with the phone through any available pre-configured or open wifi point or 3g/gprs.

As a long time lurker here I know there are mixed feelings about trusting your data to Googles servers but the practical day to day benefits for me are great. As you describe above, the device itself is frankly completely replaceable. If I lose or break it, I can pick up another one (lets imagine away the insurance business for a second), sign in, and I'm back to where I was. Thanks to Android market I can quickly replace all my software too.

I keep fairly up to date on mobile tech and I read a lot of talk about programs to do push email, exchange servers, outlook syncing etc. but I'm not a corporate worker, I don't have the backing of a company IT department, it's just my personal phone and my personal data so having that seamless sync experience and the choice to use any handy browser to interact with the most important stuff on my phone is quite a step up.

The N95 was a brilliant handset and was (potentially) capable of so much, but it suffered from a badly outdated interface and very random and spotty software support. It did raise the bar for hardware specs when it came out, in much the same way that the iphone has raised it for the user interface and overall experience. Both of them forced other manufacturers to respond. I feel that Android/Google is/are raising the stakes for connectedness and taking us a big step closer to the future you describe.

I'm very much looking forward to seeing how it develops.

Slashdot Top Deals