raacz's site

Gadgets:

Use this Simple Time Tracker by Razeeman, available on F-Droid and the Google Play Store if you quickly lose track of time, have a bad memory, have work hours you need to track, have habits you want to track, or want to track what % of your life you spend commuting. It can also be compiled from source; the github is freely out there and accepts contributions. No ads. No privacy issues. Responsive developer who has implemented a thing or two that I asked for. I live by the graces of this app.

Use this browser-based Sleep Calculator to coordinate your wake up time to fall in between 90-minute sleep cycles. Good if you have trouble waking up in the morning.

If you need something to read aloud your pirated ePubs, there is no smoother narration that you could get without paying than can be found in Google Play Books. Play Books doesn't have a sleep timer, any options to set the pace of your reader, or really any user-friendly features. But it's genuinely just such a great free TTS voice that I could not live without (literally, it gets me through my classes where I need to do a lot of reading).

Install the u-Block Origin extension into your Firefox or Chrome browser to improve efficiency and block disrupting capitalist content!

If you are like me and sometimes really do not want to use your voice to speak, but everyone around you hasn't been accomodating enough to learn sign language, and it doesn't make sense to use text, and you have an Android device, use Tell Me, a no-fuss text-to-speech interface meant exactly for people like you and I. Save common phrases, quickly type, voice, and clear text.

Listen to Kill James Bond!, a film review podcast hosted by two transgender women who both spent their youths as military cadets, and a very chaotic enby. They all hail from the British Isles, which means their accents are fantastic. They start by ripping into the entire James Bond oeuvre but they'll watch just about anything, firmly addressing key issues of our age such as militarism, nationalism, toxic masculinity and poor colour grading. Lots of horniness, jokes, somber moments, moments of collective outrage, making fun of 9/11, all the good things you need in a podcast.

Listen to Death Panel, a leftist podcast primarily about disability, American politics, and how 'health' is commodified and constructed under capitalism. Beatrice, Artie, Jules, and Phil, are all wonderful panelist-interviewers armed with incredible lived experience of dealing with systems like Medicare. Impressively, the guests that come onto Death Panel are some of the most urgent voices in leftist circles today. Death Panel has educated me on many areas which I had little knowledge about, supported me in my anti-psychiatry journey, and is perfect as a warm up that I can listen to before any of my justice-oriented classes.

Listen to these two short journalistic podcasts from the independent Canadian company, CANADALAND. The White Saviours follows the for-profit non-profit organizorporation, WE (formerly Free the Children) and their cult-like toxic workplace culture, criminal activities in Kenya, costly voluntourism packages, and how they bribed several members of Justin Trudeau's family. Any child growing up in Canada around the same time that I did has heard of WE days. Learn how a young child who dreamed to feed everyone in the world became an adult who allowed his platform to be used by child-labour-using megacorporations like Nestle. Another podcast, Thunder Bay, details both the structural and individual forces that makes the town of Thunder Bay one of the most dangerous for Indigenous youth. That brief summary doesn't do this podcast justice-- a combination of interviews from key actors, research, testimony and pure narrative-creating finesse makes this required listening for everyone who lives in what is now called Canada. The problems detailed here are not exclusive to Thunder Bay. Anyone delusional enough to think that Canada is a champion of human rights is also invited to listen.