Ruhani Rabin’s Technology Journal

My tested Tdarr workflow for saving NAS space with HEVC, an existing Plex GPU, file-size checks, and Radarr/Sonarr updates

I had been looking at Niri while testing CachyOS. It gave me the satisfaction of a calm, keyboard-friendly Wayland desktop, and that thought stuck with me. Over the last few weeks, I kept thinking about one practical question: How could I rebuild this workflow from my NixOS configuration with DMS and Niri, without recreating the same problems along the way? Niri is the compositor; it decides where windows live. DankMaterialShell, usually shortened to DMS, is the friendly layer around it: panel, launcher, notifications, settings, lock screen integration, wallpaper colors, tray, and a growing set of desktop conveniences. ...

Managing one Docker host is easy. Managing four of them is where the small and crazy annoyances start multiplying. One host has a Compose file under /opt. Another has everything under /home/.../docker. A storage box (NAS) has its own container manager. One machine stays on all the time. Another sleeps every night. Updates are easy until you forget which host owns which stack, which Compose file created it, and whether clicking an “update” button actually recreated the Compose project or only replaced a container underneath it. ...

I have owned the Affinity V2 Universal License for a while, and I still had the complete Windows installations for Photo 2, Designer 2, and Publisher 2 on one of the Windows drive. They were surprisingly portable on Windows. I had previously reinstalled Windows 11, opened the applications from their old location, entered my license details, and moved on using them. Linux was the more interesting question. Could I run Affinity Photo 2 properly on NixOS without turning the machine into a science project of Wine-prefix six months later? ...

I wanted to use the ChatGPT/Codex desktop application natively, which worked on NixOS with one command: NIXPKGS_ALLOW_UNFREE=1 nix run --impure github:numtide/llm-agents.nix#chatgptThat was temporary testing, but it was not how I wanted to keep it. My workstation is configured declaratively. If an application becomes part of my normal workflow, I want to put it in the NixOS configuration - not hidden inside terminal history as a command, which would be difficult to remember later on. ...