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:

Adventures Through Arch

Date: 2026-07-29 | Word Count: 2390 | Reading Time: 12 Minutes

A couple of months ago, I was given a laptop by someone I knew, an old Macbook Pro with a busted charging port (“it works when constantly plugged in with this exact cable positioned at this exact angle and you can’t ever unplug it…”). I decided to play around with some different Linux distributions, known as distros, and desktop environments and compositors. In this long post, I’ll go into what I was tried, what I liked, what I didn’t like, as well as how all this affected how I wanted to use my desktop on a day-to-day basis.

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Tags: Setup Linux

Uses

Date: 2026-07-29 | Word Count: 95 | Reading Time: 1

On this page, I will list, and update, what I am currently using on my devices. If you wish to know more about my self hosting set-up, I suggest checking out this tag here, as I tend to write quite extensively when I make changes to such a set-up.

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AOTY 2025

Date: 2026-04-17 | Word Count: 1497 | Reading Time: 8 Minutes

In this post extremely belated post, I’ll look back on the music I’ve listened to in 2025 and what ended up on my list of top fifty albums. I’ll be counting down to my favourite album of the year, and listing my three favourite tracks from each album, though these tracks aren’t in ranked order.

Usually, I write a little about each album, but due to ongoing fatigue, I’ve decided it’s better to at least get the list out rather than be bogged down with this barrier. I do feel bad about it, as I’d love to explain why certain albums are where they are, and what it was I liked and disliked in an album, maybe I’ll be able to return and expand at a later date, but for now, this is the list.

And yes, these are my favourite albums of the year, not necessarily the best, but the ones I have enjoyed the most. Not every album here is amazing, but nonetheless had at least three songs I liked - though the list is strong this year and I can easily say I liked every album, in one way or another, that landed up here!

There is also a full list of all the albums listed at the end.

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Tags: Music

openSUSE Leap 16

Date: 2026-04-16 | Word Count: 1267 | Reading Time: 6 Minutes

I’ve recently made a change in the operating system running on my laptop, and I thought I’d explain what happened there in this short post.

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Tags: Setup Linux