robinvanderknaap.dev

Setting up Be Quiet Darkmount on Arch Linux

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0200

Last month I bought myself a Be Quiet Darkmount keyboard. Be Quiet’s Darkmount is a very silent mechanical keyboard, from which the numeric pad can be mounted to the left as to the right side of the keyboard.

I was eager to use the keyboard for my Arch Linux setup, but I had some trouble getting it to work. I had trouble connecting it to IO Web Center from which you can manage the keyboard settings. Also, frustratingly, the clock on the media dock did not sync with my system’s clock after I rebooted my machine. I had to start the IO Web Center each time to set the clock correctly.

How to deploy a static website to DigitalOcean

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0200

This guide describes how to deploy a static website to a $4 Droplet at DigitalOcean. We will be using Nginx to serve our website and Certbot to manage TLS certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt. Finally, we setup GitHub Actions to automate the deployment of the website.

Easier alternatives to deploy and host static websites are available of course, most notably Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel and Render. But sometimes you want to have close control over your webserver, or you don’t want these parties to manage your DNS, which is usually required. In that case, managing your own server is a great solution. I like DigitalOcean for hosting my virtual machines (called Droplets), but with a little imagination you can apply this guide to any other provider of virtual machines.

Everything I learned about Hugo: Building robinvanderknaap.dev

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0200

Last year I’ve been building two websites using Hugo: our corporate website communicatie-cockpit.nl and my personal blog robinvanderknaap.dev.

A lot of options are available when it comes to static site generators, I decided upon Hugo because of it’s speed, the fact that it doesn’t use some kind of JavaScript framework and finally, because it is one of the most used generators out there.

I have no regrets choosing Hugo, but my main pain was the lack of guidance on how to get started. Most tutorials start with pre-built themes, which is a great feature for people who want to create a site quickly and only worry about the content. I wanted to create a website from scratch and have full control over what the website looks like and how it behaves. Although, almost all features are documented, it’s difficult to get started with Hugo from scratch because you have to understand the concepts first and how it all works together.