Bookmarks and Other Links

Family

Mickey Ristroph
Gunnar Ristroph

Friends

Philip Miloslavsky
Joel Gwynn
Bob Bourgeois
Bill Eastman

Interesting People

Seth Finkelstein
David B. Thomas
Robert Nagle
Tim Riker
Matthew Maly

Web Logs

Chaos Manor - Day book and email.
The Dweebspeak Primer by Joe Barr.
Bad Commie Blog
Neville Medhora's Blog

Interesting Companies

Armadillo Aerospace.
Scaled Composites also has an entry into the X Prize contest.
Arizona Cooperative Power, LLC is working on a pretty cool linux PDA.
North Shore Circuit Design
The Picputer is a very interesting little product, maybe it could be used in robotics.
iPhone applications
Slacker Factor, a way to keep track of shared expenses.

Milling, 3d Printing, and other shop stuff

Sherline is an American manufacturer of small lathes and mills. I am particularly interested in there CNC Mill which uses LinuxCNC. I enjoyed reading these instructions and maybe in a year or two I'll get the machine. Another great thing to read is Sherline founder Jim Miller's online book of business advice to small businessmen.

ZiZi Press, publishes a single book, a guide to Signals and Systems.
Mini-Lathe.com. This is great site. I liked reading about the Sieg factory in China. The list of shop web pages contains a lot of great stuff.

Interesting Groups

X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio(look at their photos)
The Robot Group
Austin Linux Experimentalists
coprolite.com
Texploration, a site about urban explorers.
Home Built Fusion (does not actually make more energy than required to run it)
Guerrilla Gardening (I have called this Pirate Farming, and thought it was an original idea . . .)
Deliberative Assembly: a way to manage online meetings in a civilized, Robert's Rules of Order style method, but a bit simplified and adapted to the internet.

Freedom

Deprogramming Cultists
The Constitution Society
And Then There Were None by E.F. Russell.
Cassius Marcellus Clay -- an American hero ( the guy Muhammed Ali was named after, not the boxer himself)
You can also be free by not needing a lot of crap
Janet Rankin.
Deschooling Society
Articles deleted from wikipedia.

History

The killing of Jesse James

Practical Computer Links

ixquick.com, a search engine that is more careful about privacy.
PAUD -- Parted and utilities on one floppy diskette.
Glade 2 Tutorial -- Glade is a GUI builder.
The Introduction to Computational Physics course at UT has a nice guide to programming in C on linux, which may be useful for someone who wants to get started programming.
Old TRS-80 stuff, including tools for using the Catweaseal floppy controller.
GameProgrammer.Com, Bob Pendleton's website.
Fry's ads on the web (not an offical Fry's web site)
Some information on HP's inkjet cartridges and how they work.
I remember people bemoaning the rise of PCI over ISA, because they believed the home tinkerer could never make a custom PCI board the way one can make a custom ISA board. Here is a home-made PCI board.
Some good information about parallel ports. I also recommend the book by Paul Bergsman, "Controlling the World With Your PC".

Other Stuff

Alaska Mining Stories, Tales, and Rumors
Pictures of "trommel" gold separator
Mercurochrome
This is a fascinating page on the "primative" fire making technique of the fire piston. I will post pictures when I make one of these.
A couple of useful scripts for monitoring battery power in a laptop.
A human powered lawn mower.
Cigar Box Guitars, a site about the homemade musical instruments.
The Austin Goodwill Computer Works Computer Museum in Austin, Texas. I recommend visiting this if you get the chance. If you visit it and like it, be sure to express your appreciation to the staff there so that Goodwill realizes what a valuable thing they have.
Note - the Goodwill Computer Works facility is moving to a new location close to the Walmart on 290. The Museum has been closed for a while, and I don't know when it will re-open in the new location.
Dave's Old Computers, someone's private compture museum.
Bigger Hammer
Notes on cellular coverage and service problems
The Goodwill Computer Works Museum in Austin, Texas. I recommend visiting this if you get the chance. If you visit it and like it, be sure to express your appreciation to the staff there so that Goodwill realizes what a valuable thing they have.
Old Soviet era Russian calculators
TuxScreen Project, a telephone with an ARM processor in it, running linux.
My cousin recording moaning sand dunes
Geek Austin
Nova Express, a science fiction magazine.
Bonsai Kitten
The Veldt by Ray Bradbury.
The Last Question by Isaac Asimov.
A Bum's Christmas
The Librarian Action Figure
An interesting standpoint on why you should use encryption.
EWD's papers: rather than introduce him, I think you should read a few of his papers choosen at random.
Major General Smedley Butler
Cotton mill steam engine in Smithville, Texas.
Vehicles powered by wood fumes, modified during WWII.
Social Graphs as art.

Places Where I or Friends Have Worked

Portusgroup sells an interesting system that allows you to use voice modems to make a PBX out of a computer, with phone tree menus, voice mail boxes, phone to database gateways, etc. It is configurable in lisp and is what is called an "IVR" or Interactive Voice Response. They also resell TeleAdvantage.
Rolostar.
American Diamond, an online jewlery seller.
Airlink Systems, a provider of services to travel agents.
Alphatech.
XLData
Transport Solutions USA, LLC, a vehicle carrier.
Superior IT Services
Extreme Music Group
Changing LINKS
Robert G. Ristroph
Last modified: Tue Feb 3 11:26:56 CST 2009