Pete Hindle

“…what I ache for is a world where people really dream of incredible things, and above people who are in charge of the media, people who paid a lot of money, actually use their imagination and intelligence to take me places and tell me things I don’t know.” Adam Curtis, 2007

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.

The title of the fifth book in Douglas Adams’ series, “Mostly Harmless”, comes from a fictional description of the earth as a civilisation. It’s a great pairing of words – the innocuous framed with a hint of threat. Isn’t that what the world of programming is like though? It’s ninety-five percent unthreatening typing activities, with a [...]

Yesterday was Towel Day, which is an unofficial holiday to mark the anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams. I had no idea when I started writing these blog posts that there was such a thing, and it’s not why I chose to title them after the novels in Adams’ Hitchhiker series. But it is [...]

I realised today that I could have titled this “Life, the University, and Everything”, which would have worked a lot better. Hey ho. The grandiose title of this piece could be read as a sign that I’m going to write about things other than relevant to the course. In general, I’m going to steer clear [...]

I’m eating a lot of pop tarts at the minute. So let’s have a quick diversion into the history of pop tarts. Pop tarts are a form of sugary pastry sold by Kellogg’s. The achieved a small amount of notoriety in the early 1990’s, in the UK at least, for burning the hands of a [...]

The current state of my Basic Techniques project is this: It doesn’t work. However, this is a defeatist attitude. Not quite as defeatist as I’ve been considering (it doesn’t work, I’m never going to understand regex, and I’m going to stop bothering with programming being the other considered viewpoint). On the other hand, sometimes the [...]

I’ll be doing a placement at the Star and Shadow cinema from the 1st of June. Above? That’s course-mate Oliver and his SDF Collective, playing at the Star and Shadow whilst supporting Ariel Pink.

This is part of my coursework, where I’m trying to define the area that hackerspaces are working in from an artistic perspective. This text is a fragment of writing that I couldn’t fit into the two larger pieces that I’m writing at the minute. In his essay, “DIY: The Militant March of Technology”, Marcin Ramocki [...]

Again, this blog post is part of my basic techniques module, so you might not find this thrilling… casual readers might want to skip this blog post and come back later. As part of my basic techniques module I wanted to work on something quite simple. I’ve broken it down into lots of smaller chunks, [...]