Pete Hindle

I get unstuck when people say that they think the new Doctor Who is good. The TV program itself is a fairly mediocre production, which lurches from set piece to set piece with some spectacularly bad character development. I think people are so attached to it because it’s one of the few programs that are [...]

I had Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on my iPhone for about 72 hours before I deleted it. GTA:CW is supposed to be one of the best games out there for the iPhone. It offers an immersive world, with full sandbox features, and it’s a continuation of one of the best game franchises around. So [...]

I knew it was a bad sign when, halfway through the film, I started regretting not going to Maplin’s. That’s not how it should work if you put the cash down to go and see the latest Hollywood blockbuster; you shouldn’t have the urge to stifle a yawn halfway through, let alone think about checking [...]

This book starts with a potted history of Wikipedia, beginning at it’s predecessor Nupedia, and then follows the development of the site until sometime in mid-2008, when the book was published. As an effort to keep up with both change and the technology, a wiki was set up to act as an afterword. Weirdly, although [...]

My reading of Infinite Jest is part of Infinite Summer, an online reading group of the novel by David Wallace Foster Infinite Jest: is it really that great a novel, or is it merely called a great novel owing to its size? After all, American’s like big things: Buicks, skyscrapers, Texas. And Infinite Jest is [...]

Confederacy of Dunces is a book from the late 1960’s, set in New Orleans. I first heard of it from the writer/speaker/internet guy Merlin Mann, who uses a line from it as his Twitter ‘handle’, differentiating his presence on the mighty microblogging service from his more professional website, 43folders.com. As I said in my last [...]

Now that the scary ’100th post’ is out of the way, this seems like a good time to talk about the program of reading I’m undertaking this summer. For my coursework, I’m slogging through what seems to be an unending amount of PDF’s and websites which suck all the joy out of reading. I even [...]

This is a piece written for Kino Bambino, a local zine run by film fans in Newcastle. You’ll be able to pick up a copy from the Star and Shadow, amongst other places, from 14/05/2009 onwards. Have you noticed a trend with summer blockbusters? I have. They like to take a well-known nerdy book, film, [...]

Newcastle blogger Alex Bettylou wrote this review of her favourite coffee shop, after I asked her to do something along those lines. I was a little surprised at her choice of venue, but like my girlfriend says, I’m a snobby snob snob snob, so I’ve got some exacting opinions about coffee shops. It shall serve [...]

ScribeFire is a rich-text blog posting… thing… that I’m trying out to see if I blog more. It works within the Firefox browser, popping up inside the window you are using when you click a little icon. This is my first run of using it. I’m writing down my impressions of as I go. The [...]