die trying

January 22nd, 2026

I'm obsessed with this picture of Penny

Posted January 22nd, 2026 by Ian Pringle, Permalink Pentax K1000, Ilford HP5

November 14th, 2025

Constraint is the Condition of Art

After ditching my smartphone for a dumbphone, I found myself missing photography. This led me to acquire a Pentax K1000 film camera, which reminded me that constraints are the condition of art. Modern content is instant, infinite, and disposable—measured in likes and impressions. Art is slow, thoughtful, and purposeful.

November 14th, 2025

The Obligatory Annual-ish Update

Keeping a blog is hard because you have to write stuff periodically. It's much easier to build a new one, throw up a few posts to make sure it's all working, and than move onto another website next year.

January 15th, 2025

I'm obsessed with this picture of Penny

Posted January 15th, 2025 by Ian Pringle, Permalink

July 19th, 2024

Trapped in the Home

Oh late I've been feeling trapped in my house. Not because I cannot physically leave, but because I must be in the home eight hours a day to work.

June 18th, 2024

Die Trying, lol

I've been working on a new website, of course... https://die-trying.lol. I have no clue what it's going to "be". Honestly probably nothing. I just liked the domain.

This is week two of getting back into exercise and reclaiming my body and mind. Today on my one mile run I was joined by both Alistair and Estelle. We ran 1.1 miles in exactly 12 minutes today. Afterwards I managed five sets of kettlebell swings @ 20kg, where each set was made up of 10 swings per arm, for a total of 20 swings.

June 17, 2024

June 16th, 2024

Phone Debloat

I'd like to downgrade to a dumbphone or a minimalist phone one day. My hang-up right now is that I use my phone for a number of things, and if I switched to a phone with fewer features, I'd end up either losing out on these things (some of which I view as a neccesity) or at the very least I'd need to find a new tool/device/system to replace these features with. I figured step one was to reduce the amount of uses I have for my phone.

February 1st, 2024

Gastrosophy, a Philosophy of Food

I've been working on a "philosophy of food" sort of thing for a few years and trying to really get at something that's "natural" and maybe is a common rule/concept among most people in the world historically.

August 28th, 2023

Exploring the Raindrop.io API

I want to integrate the Raindrop.io API into emacs so I can grab all my unsorted bookmarks, sort them in an orgfile, and then export those changes back up to Raindrop.io.

August 25th, 2023

A Short Canoe Trip

Went canoeing down the Eleven Point River last weekend. The plan was to camp out on the river over night, but we ended up not going far enough up river to make a two-day trip very viable, so we ended up finishing the 14 mile trip in one day.

April 26th, 2023

Gradient Background With Dithering In A Canvas Element

It's a good question, why am I using a canvas element instead of just using the native gradient function in CSS3? Well, that function is lackluster and causes banding issues on some browsers.

October 24th, 2022

I Am Back

Hey! I'm back after a two-ish week paternity leave. We had a baby girl on October 6th and I've been more or less offline since then. Our baby girl is named Penelope.

September 21st, 2022

Baby, Incoming?

We may or may not have a new baby in the next few days. My wife has been laboring since yesterday. The midwife and I think it won't be much longer now.

September 2nd, 2022

Why I Migrated From K8s

At the time of this writing, my blog is still hosted with Vercel, however I think I will eventually move it to my VM. However, all the other sites and services I host have been migrated to my new VM.

September 2nd, 2022

Setting Up A Firewall

I am migrating from Kubernetes to a VM. The tl;dr on the VM is that it's an Ubuntu machine, serving my various sites and services with Caddy.

August 27th, 2022

Commonplacing

So, I'm thinking about the concept of digital gardens, the ideas behind Zettelkasten, and my own interpretation of that I am currently calling "Grok".

August 23rd, 2022

Playing With Hugo

So I've spent some time playing with Hugo and more specifically, I've been playing with ox-hugo which is a way of exporting Org files to Markdown that plays nicely with Hugo. I'm not happy with my current blog setup.

August 23rd, 2022

New Puppy!

I got a new puppy today! I still don't have a name for him. He's a Catahoula Leopard dog. That tail is gonna take some getting used to, it's not docked, that's just what they call a "bob" tail, it's natural and common on this breed.

August 18th, 2022

The Time Is Wrong!

Well... it has happened again. The last time it was because of the YAML format interpretting timestamps as UTC unless explicitly set otherwise. And I fixed that issue... but that won't help this, since I gave up on using Contentlayer like two days later.

August 17th, 2022

Vercel Woes

Vercel is the company behind Nextjs and also a hosting platform that works with static site generates (Huga, Jekyll, Zola, etc.) and server side generators (Nextjs). I've been using them to host my new blog since it's inception because they promise -- and mostly make good on the promise -- easy deployments.

August 9th, 2022

Literate Dots Part 1: Zsh!

I had mentioned tangling all the things yesterday, and I've gone ahead and gotten a literate Zsh config up and running this morning. I've also created a new repo for it.

August 9th, 2022

Indie Web

The Indie Web is basically an attempt at providing standards and tooling to create websites that are federated and connected to one another. Some of the things they have include IndieAuth, Webmentions, h-cards, h-entries, and syndication with POSSE.

August 8th, 2022

Tangle All The Things

So I had this idea last night, and like with all great ideas I googled it see if anyone else had come up with it first. To my dismay, I was far from the first person to have this awesome idea. The idea? Literate dotfiles!

August 8th, 2022

My Dirty Hack to Template Files

It's actually kind of hard to use a template to create a new file. Apparently this is part of Doom, but I couldn't figure out how to get teh file-templates to work in Doom.

August 8th, 2022

Keeping Some Content Private A Stop-Gap

So I'd like to keep some content in my org repo private -- things like todos, journals, and unfinished posts. Ultimately I'd like to put this sort of stuff behind a login, but as a stop-gap I'm thinking to go the brute-force way and rm it.

August 7th, 2022

Deployment. How Do?

Currently, ian.ist is hosted with Vercel. I am using Vercel and not my Bitranchlabs Infra because it was easier, and I am also not sure if I am going to keep my Kubernetes stuff running -- it's $50+ / month for something I really don't need.

August 4th, 2022

Apothegm

Apothegm is a funny word you might use to let others know you are infinitely smarter than they are. It's a funny word with some serious clout, but ultimately it just means "a terse, witty, instructive saying; a maxim."

August 3rd, 2022

Migrating To Org Mode

I am back to (doom)emacs+org-mode, again... again... again... Why? I like it! I tried to use ox-hugo. And it seemed nice, but way to much extra.

July 29th, 2022

The Case of the Wrong Date

I noticed a funny thing happening, the dates for my posts were wrong. The source of the post would contain the correct value in the frontmatter, for example the date of my first post was 2022-07-25 but when that was rendered by NextJS and spit out on the website it was coming in a whole day earlier.

July 28th, 2022

Code Example

This is just an example of some code blocks for testing rehype prism. This is the time parser I use for Planwarrior.

July 27th, 2022

Content Layer Is Cool

I've been using contentlayer with this new NextJS blog/digital-garden/website/thing and so far I'm really liking it. Content Layer is basically a way of reading MD and MDX files and then turning them into JSON that JavaScript can then process.

There's nothing else to see, but you can check out my lorem ipsum page...