Jessica Journals

Welcome!

Hello! I'm Jessica, and welcome to Jessica Journals, to my little home on the internet! A cartoon image, from the shoulders up, of a curly brown haired white woman wearing glasses, a purple top, and gray dungarees. Behind are large stripes in black, gray, white and purple, with faint stars.

This is a website where I write about various interests of mine, mostly involving various aspects of techonology including self hosting, productivity and applications.

However, I have recently expanded to include more interests of mine, taking note from the resurgence of websites inspired by those from the 1990s and 2000s, the era I began participating online.

The content has been organised into a series of rooms, as if this website were a house. You can click on “Rooms” in the navigation bar above to find out more about the rooms and what is inside of them. Posts can also be navigated through the “Tags” page if you prefer instead, or by clicking on “Posts” which lists all the posts chronologically, both also found in the navigation bar. Lastly, “Recent Changes” of the last ten updated posts has been listed below.

Recent Posts:

Lorien

As I wrote in a previous post, a website I was administrating unexpectedly experienced a disaster recently. I had to work out how to save the data, how to set up a new website, how to move it over to a new web host, and also put forward backup plans on what to do if any of my steps in these processes failed.

I didn’t want to type out my ideas as I was more in the frame of mind to sketch them out, with floating bullet pointed lists, arrows linking things together like a mind map, and wanted a way to quickly cross ideas out which wouldn’t, or proved not to, work. But I also didn’t want to do this on paper as my notepads are small, I wanted to be able to erase stuff quickly too.

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Tags: Applications Productivity

Linux Mint

In my recent post about note taking, I talked about the issue I was having with an old MacBook Air (mid-2011) becoming obsolete as Apple had decided it should no longer be upgradable to newer operating systems. While this may not seem such a problem on the face of it with me just missing out on new features, the larger issue is installing applications - many will simply refuse to run on older operating systems. As such, unless I stick to applications which are themselves outdated receiving no new updates, a ticking time bomb looms over me, with newer updates to any existing software refusing to install, and if I wipe my devices and need to reinstall, many applications which worked on their older versions will not install anymore.

In this post, I will describe what I initially did to try and address these issues, where I went next with installing Linux Mint, and how the process went in trying to emulate my workflow now on Linux.

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Tags: Applications Setup Hardware Linux Mac

Getting Here Technically

Growing up through the growth of the world wide web, and interested in website administration throughout, I have created many websites in my time. I made my first website when I was nine years old, a simple website coded in the most basic of HTML about video games I liked to play.

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Tags: Applications Website Hugo WordPress Web 1.0

Long-Form Writing Applications

In my post about subscriptions, I mentioned Spaces, and realised I had not yet discussed why I had encountered it, same with Obsidian. In this post, I’ll go into my current thinking and exploration regarding long-form writing apps, elaborating on my current thinking (as my mind is changing every few hours at the point when it comes to thinking about this subject), with a post soon regarding ‘second brain’ systems and note-taking.

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Tags: Applications Productivity

Subscriptions

A theme which may be spotted throughout my posts so far is a dislike for subscriptions. However, I do have a few subscriptions, and I’ll discuss here why I have them, what the alternatives are, the lifetime subscriptions I have, and matters around sustainability when it comes to development.

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Tags: Applications Money Mental Health