You've got to hire the best cast

The best online platforms to find a range of race cars for sale are this cool site. Porsche or Ferrari, whatever is your need, you name it and they have it out there. The racing cars for sale could be negotiated for the best possible prices as there would be a little bit competition too. You could get into the action when you drag race cars for sale.Chances for getting your passionate race cars at affordable prices are higher when you are a regular visitor to the site. Dirt race cars for sale could be found here with fascinating pictures of these racing vehicles in action.You could also advertise your vintage race cars for sale, in this classifieds site.We just weren't quick enough on the start today  A lot of buyers are impressed with the huge number of used race cars for sale, out here in this site. Some of the dirt track race cars for sale announced here are quite amazing to stun and impress any car lover. You could get accessories for the cars also from this same online platform. Just keep a regular check in this race car classifieds, and you are sure to get your turn soon.Generally car races pump up adrenalin in the viewers to be excited to watch the amazing speed with which cars race one another in the circuit.

Tremendous amount of crowd gathered for these amazing car races, cheer up the participants to the motivate and encourage them to give their best in the race. Some of the serious accidents do occur at times as well. There are so many race men that had lost their arms and legs and many that have died on the spot as well. The safety of the participants is taken care adequately in the form of safe aprons, helmet, goggles, and foot wear and so on.Still, when the accident is something like a literal collision or something of that sort, then it is always lethal for the participants. These sports men are some of the highly paid in the trade. The top racers mostly have most of their bodily parts in steel as they have undergone one type of surgery or the other during their course of life as a sport star.Informatica is something that you may have heard of before or maybe you are not aware of it. However, if you are not aware of it you are truly missing out on this great bit of knowledge that is essential. Informatica is a kind of software which allows the user to create a data warehouse in easy way. Informatica training brings a new and simple concept i.e. "Data Warehousing".Informatica training: What is Data Warehousing? The use of data warehousing for a business is an innovative way. It is useful for a business to lower their operating costs and raise the production rates.

We just weren't quick enough on the start today

For the second straight year in a row, the forward from St. Albert gave fans a reason to throw their teddy bears on the ice following a first period wrister from the left side that beat a sprawling Jacob Suppes in net."Shoot and close your eyes and hope it goes in. Two years in a row I guess I was lucky," said Lalot after the game.It wasn't all roses for the Barons though as the Storm retaliated with two second period goals to put the MOB's home winning streak on the line.After the team killed off a 5-on-3, Kevin Miller fed Houcher who carried the puck the length of the ice before dishing it across to Lalor who immediately deposited it into the net for his second of the night.With less than two minutes to go, Houcher took a feed from Lalor and walked through the MOB's defence unopposed before out waiting Suppes and scoring the game winning goal with a minute thirteen left on the clock. Fire officials recommended you have your chimney inspected every year.

Sony may be looking to take the relatively new field of wearable electronics in a slightly unexpected direction if a patent filed by the company is any indication. The patent isn't for a competing version of Google Glasses, nor on a watch so smart that it could join Mensa, but on the SmartWig. Scratching your head yet? Before you pull the rug out from under this concept, some of the possible applications are more useful than one might expect from a hi-tech hairpiece.Wearable electronics is a concept looking for killer applications. Currently, the largest sector for wearable electronics is in fitness and medical devices, often taking the form of bracelets or armbands. Smartwatches and computational glasses currently appear to be in second place, although they have not yet found their true purpose in the scheme of things either.No one, however, appears to have speculated about the vast potential and tremendous vistas that would be unlocked by hair with intelligence. The developers of Sony's SmartWig, Hiroaki Tobita and Takuya Kuzi, shared their thoughts on this issue in an essay last year:"There is a wide variety of wearable computing devices, such as computational glasses, clothes, shoes, and so on... However, most wearable devices have become neither common nor popular... We think one of the biggest reasons is the style... the focus has been [on] function, not style...

Tigers making moves to re-tool for another 2014 run

Our GM tenure began the moment Koji Uehara vanquished our World Series aspirations. While Dave Dombrowski did a great job leading the team this far, myself and Mr. J were brought aboard by the Ilitch family to get the team over the top. Our youthful exuberance and fondness for GIFs as teaching tools in the clubhouse were seen as big positives during the interview process, which consisted of an email or two.The simulated winter meetings began on Monday, November 3rd at 9:00 a.m. While there were preliminary talks with other teams over drinks during the weekend leading up to the meetings, no action occurred until the meetings began. It was not soon after, however, that we made our first move.

We're still not sure why Dave Dombrowski turned down Mr. Veras' services in real life, but the Fake Tigers sure are glad to welcome him back in the fold for 2014. Our organization will be changing its game management philosophies in part to maximize the bullpen's efficiency, and we saw Jose as part of that plan. Speaking of changing our organization's philosophies, that leads me to our next move...During our interviews with the Fake Brad Ausmus that I made up in my head, Brad was eager to implement our sabermetric philosophies into his game planning. Terms of his contract were not released, in part because I didn't have time at work to negotiate with myself over what our fake manager would make.One of the most important aspects of a general manager's job during the offseason is deciding which players to retain and which to let go.

Luckily for us, things were not so difficult. Of the Tigers' nine arbitration-eligible players, Phil Coke and Don Kelly were the only two to not receive contract tenders for the 2014 season.At this point, our main goal was similar to what the real-life goal should be for this Tigers team: re-sign Omar Infante and shore up the bullpen. Both of these goals have been met.According to sources, the Tigers' deal with Fake Infante is worth $30 million over three years. In a vacuum, the price seems steep. However, compared to what other free agents are getting, this seems to be a bargain.

Islip offers golf to kids with autism

"The kids don't think it's therapy. Aiden thinks it's just sports time," said Lorenzo, an aide to town Councilman Anthony Senft who learned about the program when therapist Alexander Lopez spoke at a recent town board meeting.Through Councilman Steve Flotteron, the town has worked with Lopez in the past on a golf program aimed at mentoring troubled teenagers in Brentwood.The program was so successful that Lopez launched similar programs at universities in Newark and Salt Lake City.Flotteron noted that these collaborative programs reach out to local youths without costing taxpayer money. "It costs the town nothing," he said.Lopez said he started Inclusive Sports and Fitness to help the children improve through the fun and activity of the sport.

"They're working on their balance, working on their coordination," Lopez said, adding that golf involves core exercises such as "crossing your midline" and hand-eye coordination.The 10-week program takes place on town golf facilities and at Give It Your All Sports in Ronkonkoma, which rents Lopez the facility at a discount. The town waives fees for use of the golf courses.While Lopez and other therapists volunteer their time along with student interns from Stony Brook University and Touro College, Lopez charges a $30 fee for each 90-minute session to pay for facilities and for a yoga teacher, who provides the youths another form of exercise.Golf is especially useful for teaching body motion to children, said Holbrook Country Club's golf pro Bill Leposa, who advised Lopez on developing the program.

"It has the instant gratification of seeing the ball move," Leposa said. "There's no body type required, either. As long as you can move this way and that way," he added, demonstrating the classic golf swing.The golf program, now in its second session,To keep things interesting is geared toward high-functioning children with autism who are 6 to 11 years old and left out of mainstream youth sports."Sports after a certain grade level gets very complicated, very cliquish," Lopez said. "These kids, they just need attention. They're not getting the resources anymore and they become sedentary. This is designed to help them strengthen their bodies."

To keep things interesting

In a way, one could think that Precision Moment Targeting is like Facebook's advertising platform where it's not a pray or spray model, but catering towards a consumer's interest, background, and what they've been talking about.The launch of Precision Moments Targeting could be incredibly useful in Japan, where the company recently signed a real with Yahoo Japan, the largest media company in the country with "tens of millions" of uses across the Web and mobile services. At the time, Kiip said that the deal would see its service integrated into the Yahoo Japan iOS and Android apps and serve ads and rewards for completing activities within the app. Sounds like 'moments', to us.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has repeatedly said that one of the company's mobile goals is to create apps that helps you take care of your daily habits, including mail, search, weather, and more. Granted Yahoo Japan is only one company, but its reach isn't something to laugh about. And if Kiip rolls the same integration into other platforms and services, it could potentially get real interesting for the company.The company says that there are more than 511 million moments taking place each month and these include things like favoriting a song, finishing a task on your to-do list, or saving a recipe. It wouldn't be too far-fetched for a consumer to receive a coupon at a grocery store when they cross off items from their shopping list, or perhaps a special at a restaurant when saving a recipe for a particular dish.

To keep things interesting, Kiip has also teamed with comScore to be one of its data sources. Now, when advertisers reference comScore data and insights on mobile advertising, some of that will come from Kiip.Practically all common purchases, from a can of soft drink to a new pair of jeans, are more expensive in Australian cities than in urban centres in the US and UK, crowd-sourced data shows.Having recently moved to Sydney from London, I can attest to doing frantic calculations in my head while staring at a standard pack of chicken breasts, trying desperately to look at my new shopping experiences in a favourable light.So it was with trepidation that I faced up to the figures using a new online tool, Budget Direct, which shows users exactly what they are paying for goods and services compared to others in the world. Yes, a standard white loaf costs around $3.50 in Sydney, not the $1.64 it would in London. A kilogram of potatoes costs $3 in Melbourne but just $2.16 in New York.

As spy U.S. row grows, Europe threatens to suspend cash tracking tool

Merkel said Friday that she is open to the idea of suspending the SWIFT agreement, saying she "needed to look at this again more closely" and weigh "what we will lose for the security of our citizens and what we don't."Germany and other European governments have made clear they do not favor suspending the U.S.-EU trade talks which began last summer because both sides stand to gain so much through the proposed deal, especially against competition from China and other emerging markets.Still, the Europeans have said they will insist that the trade agreement includes stronger rules for protecting data as a result of the NSA allegations. Data protection laws in Europe are generally stronger than in the United States.

"It's obvious to us that we have to and will bring our European convictions regarding data protection, and protection of privacy and business information, into these negotiations," Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, told reporters in Berlin on Monday.Elmar Brok, the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, told reporters that failure to resolve the differences over data protection could threaten the trade talks. Brok,Twiage's tool helps EMTs forward data a member of Merkel's party who was in Washington to discuss the spy allegations, said the challenge is to strike a balance between security and personal freedom."We are fighting for the rights of our citizens," he said.

The steady drumbeat of reports stemming from documents provided to various media by NSA leaker Edward Snowden has created a sense of urgency among European governments that, at the very least, they need to be seen in the eyes of their citizens to be doing something to stop the spying.At the same time, European leaders are anxious to avoid lasting damage in relations with their major ally. So far the issue has not hurt Obama politically within the United States because Republicans have blamed Snowden rather than the White House for the flap.In the latest allegation, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo published a document it said showed the NSA had eavesdropped on more than 60 million phone calls in Spain between Dec. 10 last year and Jan. 8. The U.S. ambassador to Spain was summoned to the Foreign Ministry for an explanation.

Twiage's tool helps EMTs forward data

Running the Twiage app on a smartphone, an EMT can dictate notes and send them to the hospital as text, and also share photographs of a patient's injuries, identification, and EKG readings. It's like Twitter for triage. Get it? Twiage.The company was born out of a recent hackathon at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Fittingly, Twiage is the brainchild of an MIT grad named Crystal Law, who also happens to be an EMT.In addition to the smartphone app, there's a version of Twiage for Google Glass, which means John Rodley is involved.Rodley has been working for months on an app called ArrtGlass that uses the wearable computer's first-person camera to let a doctor who cannot be in a hospital room see a patient through the eyes of someone at the bedside.

At the hackathon, Twiage won the Ariadne Labs Prize, which comes with a chance to pitch for a $100,000 grant in the coming months. Ariadne Labs, a center for health systems innovation, opened last year as a joint venture of Brigham and Women's and the Harvard School of Public Health.When Disney's animators were feeling constrained by their digital tools, Sarah Frisken got the call. A former boss of hers was running Disney's research-and-development division, and he told Frisken that the animators felt they could not do their best work using existing software. "It was taking them twice as long to use the digital tools, and they wanted them to be more responsive," Frisken said.She spent four years developing what became the Sketch Drawing Engine for Disney.

The guiding philosophy, Frisken said, "was that it is so easy to pick up a piece of paper and sketch out an idea. We wanted to do that same thing with software, where you could just open it and start to draw."This past summer, Frisken, a former Tufts computer graphics professor, released a new version of the software, called Mischief. She is targeting professional artists and designers who tend to use a tablet and stylus for input — though you can use a mouse, too. The software sells for $65, and it is available for Macs and PCs. The company, 61 Solutions, still consists of just Frisken and a handful of contractors. She has boot-strapped the Cambridge start-up so far, but may try to raise outside funding.October is National Pizza Month, which at some of the start-ups I visit is sort of like saying October is National Oxygen Month.

Paramus police charge West New York man in 'Tool Town' generator thefts

"This study suggests the tremendous power of using systems biology and bioinformatics to better understand health and disease," Hood said in a statement. "These systems approaches convert blood into a window that will readily allow us to distinguish health from disease —While the species of the crow family and if disease, which disease. This is just the beginning. The principles used to develop this classifier should be applicable to a range of unmet diagnostic medical needs."A West New York man has been charged with stealing more than $5,000 worth of portable generators from a borough hardware store.Jose Portalatin-Boigue, 52, was observed by multiple passersby as he fled Tool Town on Route 17 Sunday at around 4 p.m., Paramus Police Chief Kenneth Ehrenberg said. The store was closed at the time in accordance with Blue Laws enforced by the borough and Bergen County.

Officers were dispatched to the scene, where they found the store's front door had been pried open, and three generators had gone missing.Witnesses said that a man had fled the scene in a 1999 Dodge Van, and were able to provide police with a license plate, according to Ehrenberg.That information was broadcast to area law enforcement agencies, and Paramus officers Laki Pothos and Jay Makroulakis quickly stopped the van as it traveled east on Route 4.Portalatin-Boique was taken into custody and charged with burglary, theft and possession of burglary tools. He was taken to the Bergen County Jail, where he was held on $15,000 bail. Significant African opinion appears hostile to the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

In Kenya, President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto, both under ICC indictment for crimes committed during post-election violence in 2007-2009, included in their campaign rhetoric that the ICC was a tool of Western imperialism. This view is shared by many.Others argue that the ICC is somehow "unfair" because its current cases all involve Africa. In Kenya, the parliament has called for the withdrawal from the Treaty of Rome that established the ICC.The African Union has called for the Kenyatta and Ruto cases to be referred back to the Kenyan judicial system. A special African Union summit meeting is convening in Addis Ababa to discuss the Union's relationship with the ICC. Some hope that the AU member states will withdraw as a block from the Treaty of Rome, though few expect that will actually happen.

Cheers for peers

"What we're interested in isn't who's saying it, but rather what's being said. By being anonymous, it encourages much more truthful, forthcoming feedback than I'd ever get by asking someone in person, 'How are we doing?' 'How's the culture?' Sometimes people will disguise themselves using broken English to ensure their candid remarks are never traced back to them. But we get unvarnished truth from this."Anonymous feedback also ensures every employee is given an equal vote on every question that's asked. No one person's feedback is given greater weight; the loudest voice can never drown out the others.When leaders first launch TinyPulse, they have a common fear that employees will use the technology to throw rocks at them. While some comments can be raw,Tool Rental Depot opens on South Main Street leaders are often surprised by the constructive and even praising feedback they receive.

It's a gutsy move to ask employees "How valued do you feel at work" and to then disclose that several people aren't currently feeling the love. But Niu insists the constant polling would be disingenuous were the results never released."Our philosophy is that it's incumbent upon the leader to share it," he told me. "The choice by companies to use TinyPulse inherently signals an organization's inclination toward transparency and sharing more information versus less." While managers always have the discretion to withhold some data, "we tell CEOs it's better to put it out there and acknowledge that some people aren't happy. These are great opportunities to remind employees that you're always reviewing strategy and culture; the whole reason you ask these questions is to give them a voice."

We can all recall times when managerial decisions affected us personally--and negatively--yet felt uncomfortable voicing concern. According to the TinyPulse methodology, leaders respond to all feedback they receive without knowing to whom they're responding."When managers reply this way," says Niu, "people know immediately that they've been heard and their feedback is taken seriously. And having an influential voice like this is a basic human need that's really important to people. Very often, employees get a better understanding of intended solutions or even why the business decision will go unchanged." Clarity is also the antidote to ambiguity--a known cause of employee discontent.

Tool Rental Depot opens on South Main Street

More conventional online moving tools, such as the calculators on bankrate.com or CNNMoney.com, are based on data from the Council for Community and Economic Research. The council's data allows you to compare the cost of housing, food, insurance, clothing, fuel, medical care and other common consumption items in different cities. The same data is used to provide the city-to-city cost comparison chart in each issue of Where to Retire magazine.The Tool Rental Depot, an extension of Hydraulic Depot and Custom Design, is open for business.

The three service-oriented businesses form one family-run, locally-owned and operated company at 2001 S. Main St. They are all located in the 70,000-square-foot former W.A. Brown facility.Tool Rental Depot's expansion was funded in part by a $10,825 Industrial Building Revitalization grant from the city of Salisbury.

"We are excited to expand our business and appreciate the wonderful turnout we had at our recent open house," said Phil Butler, owner of Hydraulic Depot and now Tool Rental Depot. "We look forward to serving the rental, repair, welding and fleet management needs of Salisbury, Rowan County and the surrounding area."Tool Rental Depot rents all types of tools and can service and repair a variety of construction equipment, including concrete saws, pressure washers, ground compacting equipment and aerial lifts.

The business also offers annual aerial lift inspections.Local business representatives, frequent customers, vendors and the Rowan County Chamber of Commerce and RowanWorks Economic Development Commission celebrated a grand opening and ribbon cutting event earlier this month.

Coming up with strategies

Microsoft won't say when the Remix Project will be on sale, or how much it'll cost. The company's working with both pro and amateur DJs to seed the kit, and plans to see how the response and feedback is before the product becomes widely available. Based on our experience it's a really fun, Traktor-style accessory that's going to make at least a few people think they're the new house-party DJ to beat.What makes a city a success?A Lightweight Editing Tool That Is An Opening Salvo Against Microsoft Office It's a lot of different things but in our experience economic vitality, livable neighborhoods, environmental sustainability and opportunity for all residents are critical elements.

Coming up with strategies that accomplish all these goals is a tall order, but that's the job of city leaders.In Pasadena and Santa Monica we pride ourselves on community engagement and effective planning that achieves results, such as revitalization of the 3rd Street Promenade and Old Pasadena while protecting our single family neighborhoods. We've crafted successful polices to direct new development to our downtown areas with the best transit. We've created opportunities for people who live and work locally by requiring a portion of all new apartment buildings to include some homes with affordable rents, called inclusionary zoning.

Along with 140 California cities and suburbs, we've found the sweet spot with locally crafted inclusionary policies. We get some new affordable apartments-- which are in short supply--without undermining new private investment.  More than 80,000 Californians live in homes created by inclusionary policies providing lower income and working people access to neighborhoods with good schools, jobs, and other opportunity-drivers.

A Lightweight Editing Tool That Is An Opening Salvo Against Microsoft Office

Therefore, Box, having moved files from the desktop to the cloud, has put itself in the position of providing document- and file-editing capabilities to companies large and small.Innocuous in itself, but important as that's been Microsoft's domain, I think, since before I was actually born. That same dominion has also been curator of Microsoft's bottom line for almost as long. Box is nibbling Microsoft's pond and I doubt that Redmond is happy. Box will happily tell you that it isn't out to get Office, but please.

I spoke to Levie and Box more generally about the tool, and they expect that a lightweight tool could be "Editor enough" for the average computing user. To quote the group, "most of today's tools have overshot customer needs to solve their problems."So, Box Notes. The goal, and I paraphrase Box here, is to avoid fitting our work to the tools that we have, and instead fit our tooling to our needs. This is implicit knocking of Word and the rest of the Office suite that has become — through time and agglomeration of new bells, whistles and buttons unknown — a bit bloated.

That's the goal of Box Notes, which is a simple real-time editing tool that combines collaborative typing with the Box file stack. If your company uses Box already, this will eventually the beta will remain small for now be an option for you and your colleagues to bang out simple documents. A feature called 'NoteHead,' think Facebook's ChatHead feature for analog, let's you see who is typing and where. It's a simple editor.Importantly, Box Notes is as compliant with security standards as Box is itself. Therefore, where you once could Box, but perhaps not use a different cloud-based file editing tool, you can now Box Notes, as well. In certain health-care and financial environments, this matters.

Cage: next-gen hardware is "a better tool" which offers devs "more subtlety, more nuances"

The young co-creators of the Asheville Tool Library have been working on the project for months, slowly building support and putting together applications and paperwork for grants, matching funds and the launch of the ioby campaign.It's been long, tedious work, resulting in fiscal sponsorship from Empowerment Works, a national nonprofit that supports community-based projects, and a $1,000 matching funds contribution from the Center for the New American Dream through the ioby fundraiser.

The three founders are not strangers to this work. Llewellyn is founder of the REAL Cooperative, a former director of Sustainable Living Roadshow and a current campaign organizer with the Dogwood Alliance.Letts is former site manager for the Missoula Urban Demonstration Project in Montana, which is home to a longstanding tool library. Dominic is the founder of Charlotte Got Crops!,Educators describe the device's dynamic display a North Asheville neighborhood garden for single moms and their kids, and is a local permaculture activist.

Their mission is pretty straightforward: increasing access to a "share economy" while decreasing resilience on "traditional currency"; increasing access to shared tools and therefore decreasing overall consumption; increasing the knowledge base and skill sets in the community to promote self-sufficiency; and being a host site for community and educational events for residents and local teachers."We want to develop a class series around tools, tool maintenance, safe and proper tool use, tools for home and the garden, a tool class just for women, just for kids, etc.," Letts said.

Breakthrough Could Make Electronics Smaller and Better

Thus the new work is "consistent with the hypothesis" of coevolution between language and toolmaking, "but not proof of it," says Michael Corballis, a psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. "It is possible that language itself emerged much later, but was built on circuits established during the Acheulean" period.Thomas Wynn, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, is even more cautious about the results. He thinks that the fTCD technique, which measures blood flow to large areas of the cerebral cortex but does not have as high a resolution as fMRI or PET, "is a crude measure, even for brain imaging techniques."

As a result, Wynn says, he is "far from convinced" that the study has anything new to say about language evolution.Combining several standard nanofabrication techniques -- with the final addition of the Scotch Magic tape -- researchers at the University of Minnesota created extremely thin gaps through a layer of metal and patterned these tiny gaps over the entire surface of a four-inch silicon wafer. The smallest gaps were only one nanometer wide, much smaller than most researchers have been able to achieve. In addition, the widths of the gaps could be controlled on the atomic level. This work provides the basis for producing new and better nanostructures that are at the core of advanced electronic and optical devices.

One of the potential uses of nanometer-scale gaps in metal layers is to squeeze light into spaces much smaller than is otherwise possible. Collaborators at Seoul National University, led by Prof. Dai-Sik Kim, and Argonne National Laboratory, led by Dr. Matthew Pelton, showed that light could readily be squeezed through these gaps, even though the gaps are hundreds or even thousands of times smaller than the wavelength of the light used. Researchers are very interested in forcing light into small spaces because this is a way of boosting the intensity of the light. The collaborators found that the intensity inside the gaps is increased by as much as 600 million times.

Concrete blocks for tool storage

A few concrete blocks can be used to create some super storage for your yard tools. The more you have, the more versatile you can make it. Three or four blocks can be stacked up and the handles placed into the core created by the blocks. If you set two or three on the ground, then stagger stack a couple more on top of these and add a third row, also staggered, you will have created a whole line of storage holes for these tools.I have a free-standing range/oven combo. It's a great appliance, but now that we have a child I am wondering if I should try to attach it to the wall somehow to prevent it from accidentally tipping forward.

What do you suggest? The barrier to entry for game development Check your owner's manual or the manufacturer's website to see if it offers an anti-tipping bracket. Most manufacturers will have this available to you. Good for you – it's a smart thing to do. If you cannot find one, you can use some screws and a metal angle iron shaped to fit.We decided to use epoxy paint on our garage floor this summer. I wanted to do it because I wanted it to look better. I cleaned off most of the stains and followed the directions. I had no idea what the paint would do to the cleanliness of the garage. There's no more dust!

For years, we had concrete dust on the floor that got tracked into the house. Now it's gone. The garage is always clean now. Who knew? Well, I guess you probably did. – H.S.I have a new shop vacuum and it's a lot better than my old one. When the old one quit working, I was going to throw it away but decided to save some of the parts for other projects. The cord is long, so I cut it off and saved it to use with another appliance at some point. I also saved the canister part. It's large and on sturdy wheels, and I keep my garden tools and other supplies in it. It's perfect and very handy.

The barrier to entry for game development

"The barrier to entry for game development has been demolished," says games developer Christer Kaitila. "These are exciting times for an emerging art – the gates have been flung wide open."Though it started as a niche hobby, DIY game design is set to go mainstream. Microsoft's Project Spark aims to turn the making of games itself into a game. Players are given a fully configurable world that can be moulded with gestures recognised by Kinect – mountains are sculpted and valleys scooped out with a swipe of the hand. Buildings, characters and objects of almost any kind can be added via graphical interfaces.

Once it is all in place, users can devise simple scripts that give their creations programmed behaviours. One demo of the game showed how a rock, for example, could be turned into a faithful sidekick by adding a few short commands.Early testers have already created a wide variety of games, from block-matching puzzle games to side-scrollers, top-down shooters, and 3D first-person adventures – many of them recreations of existing games. Project Spark makes this level of creativity accessible by hiding hundreds of lines of code beneath the interfaces that are second nature to gamers.

Game Maker, a tool for creating games on the PC, has been used to make several successful titles, including Spelunky, Hotline Miami and Gunpoint. "Game Maker is great because it's good for beginners," says Tom Francis, who used the tool to make Gunpoint. "But it doesn't keep you a beginner." When Francis started making the game he was working as a games journalist and had no programming experience. What he likes about Game Maker is how it lets you move from sketching out the basics of a game in a drag-and-drop interface to adding in blocks of code bit by bit, as you learn. "It's a great way to ramp up," he says.