# Systems, stories, and useful notes.

I’m Ruhani Rabin. This is where I document what I build, what breaks, and what I learn while making it work again.

Canonical: https://rabin.blog/

## Recent writing

- [Distrobox on NixOS: Declare an Ubuntu Toolbox and Its Zsh Setup](https://rabin.blog/declarative-distrobox-ubuntu-zsh-nixos/): Keep NixOS as your host, use familiar Ubuntu tools inside Distrobox, and manage the container recipe and a separate Zsh configuration with Home Manager.
- [Moving from Niri and DMS to Noctalia v5 on NixOS](https://rabin.blog/move-niri-dms-to-noctalia-v5-nixos/): A reversible NixOS migration from Niri and DankMaterialShell to Noctalia v5, with shared keyring unlock, separate greeter trials, application colors, and recoverable GUI settings.
- [5 Best Terminal Tools for NixOS: My Zsh Setup and Wrappers](https://rabin.blog/best-terminal-tools-nixos-zsh/): Set up fzf, zoxide, Atuin, eza and bat on NixOS, with Zsh wrappers to find projects, edit files, search text and inspect service logs.
- [Two Months After Hugo, I Built rabin.blog Again With Astro](https://rabin.blog/why-i-moved-rabin-blog-from-hugo-to-astro/): The seventh major iteration of rabin.blog, and why experimenting with the blog is part of how I learn. This time, a small custom Astro site.
- [Install Vicinae on NixOS with a Modular Niri Setup](https://rabin.blog/how-to-install-vicinae-in-nixos-niri/): A beginner-friendly guide to adding Vicinae to NixOS with Home Manager, modular configuration, Niri shortcuts, and extensions.
- [Convert H.264 Movies/TV to H.265 with Tdarr and NVIDIA GPU on Linux](https://rabin.blog/tdarr-convert-h264-to-h265-nvidia-gpu-linux-how-to/): Use Tdarr and NVIDIA NVENC on Linux to shrink H.264 videos, keep originals when encoding fails, and sync Radarr/Sonarr
- [Moving into Niri & DankMaterialShell in NixOS](https://rabin.blog/nixos-niri-dank-how-to/): How I slowly moved into NixOS with Niri & DankMaterialShell and what was the implementation path

## Explore

- [Content index](https://rabin.blog/llms.txt)
- [Agent instructions](https://rabin.blog/agent-instructions.md)
- [About Ruhani Rabin](https://rabin.blog/about/)
- [All posts](https://rabin.blog/posts/)
- [Series](https://rabin.blog/series/)
- [Sitemap](https://rabin.blog/sitemap.xml)