Currently reading

In a nod to N+1’s excellent semi-regular N1BReading series, I’m going to attempt to detail quick, light, summaries and connections for my current readings. Leibniz’s Monadology

I am re-reading Andrew Feenberg’s excellent Questioning Technology. Going through this book for a second time has caused me to upgrade my opinion of it from masterful to nearly-or-quite-possibly desert island material. Feenberg’s approach—empirically dependent historical and philosophical analyses of technology—doesn’t have the kind of gravitas that I would normally accord to a desert island book, and it is far too light-hearted and readable to be so “serious”, but it did cause me to rethink my political heuristics. Since a re-reading necessitates greater depth and engagement, I’ve decided to read it alongside his Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (Inside Technology), a collection of essays from the last decade or so. Likewise, Feenberg engages quite regularly with Heidegger, a figure that I’ve been circling around for years now, and never taking straight on, so I’ve finally started seriously reading through Heiddegger’s oeuvre (Basic Writings).

For a soon-to-start reading group we are going through Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Birth to Presence, a collection of Nancy’s essays. Bewildering in rhetorical style (in the somewhat cloying style of Deleuze, Serres, and so on), Nancy tackles metaphysics straight away, and positions himself as a staunch anti-representationalist. Running through his work for a first time evokes many connections and themes, but no solid conclusions. Although he does not mention it, his metaphysics appear to require engagement with Parmenides’ Fragments (especially VII onwards). Annoyingly, Nancy forces the reader in to the depths of not-being, and through sleep and non-consciousness (with evident knowledge on the matter, despite the obvious impossibility of making these claims). Then, Nancy exhumes Descartes’ substance dualism with respect to sleep and dreaming, but never mentions Foucault and Derrida’s spirited debate (History of Madness) on this portion of the Meditations. I’m not confident on my interpretation, however, so I can’t tell if Nancy thinks madness is on the soul or the body. Perhaps it’s neither, given what seems to be a serious rationalist streak in the book, at times echoing Leibniz’s Monadology so loudly that I’ve decided to re-read it as a point of comparison.

Finally, I’ve just completed Siegfried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media, a kind of Kittler-esque exploration of media history. The book excels at being obscure, with foray’s into weird and wild Modern, Renaissance, and Medieval examples of seeing and hearing apparatuses. The scope and breadth of the content makes for a fun but somewhat unforgettable read.

Review of Histories of Computing

Mahoney, M. S. (2011). Histories of Computing. (T. Haigh, Ed.). Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. Reviewed July 29, 2011.

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Follow up review of BlackVPN

After many months of using BlackVPN with occasional frequency I can now speak with more confidence (than my earlier post) that their service is very good, and exactly as advertised. Recently I have been using the US VPN connection to protect my browsing in cafes from Firesheep and other attacks. Their service is always at least 2MB/s (if the cafe’s connection can provide it), and the latency is usually below 100ms. The US VPN is located in San Francisco (at least whenever I have looked). I was using the OpenVPN software to connect, but since purchasing a new Macbook Air I have used the built in PPTP service and everything works fine. Not that I watch much TV, but having the ability to watch Hulu as a Canadian is a real treat.

I highly recommend the service, and I like what they stand for. If you sign up you should use my referral code, that way we both get extra free service: ZQMCTCX

BlackVPN Review

Full disclosure: BlackVPN is offering additional free service for people willing to review their VPN service. They state that the reviews are to be accurate, and mine is.

I’ve recently switched my Internet access to Rogers in Canada. Rogers is notorious for traffic shaping content that they do not approve of, so I was naturally worried that my Bittorrent streams were going to be severely shaped or even artificially terminated (Rogers practices both forms of QoS). I have begun to look for fast, capable VPN services with a Mac OS X client.

BlackVPN is the first I have tried, and so far I am quite impressed. I am using the global service: US servers for Hulu, etc., British servers for iPlayer, and the Netherlands servers for Bittorrent. The US servers are plenty fast to stream Hulu, likewise the British servers for iPlayer, although I noticed that the HD iPlayer content struggled. Since I have the top Rogers Internet package (stated speed of 50MBit/S, although it is surely never that quick), I did not expect BlackVPN to keep up with my connection. Yet, for the Netherlands servers, the throughput was very reasonable, and frequently hit over 800Kb/S (I assume the British and US servers were even faster, but I never needed to saturate the connection with the exception of HD content).

The OpenVPN software works well with OS X, although I did have the occasional dropped connection, which in a few cases led to a very ugly kernel panic. These dropped connections are as likely a product of Rogers killing the connection as they are any fault of BlackVPN, and at any rate, the connection can keep live for 12+ hours, which is fine enough for me. BlackVPN offers a nice choice of connection types, such that you can use your iPhone or iPad with their service (once properly configured).

Overall I’m impressed with the service. It’s pricey, although not so much more than any other, and if you go for the more expensive Global service you get a great array of options.

Update on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 11:16AM by Quinn

You may want to use my referral code for BlackVPN. Using it apparentely gives you two free months of service, and gives me an additional month of service: ZQMCTCX