A slow journal of embedded systems, hardware, and low-level craft.
Long-form writing about microcontrollers, assembly language, driver development, and the strange specific corners of hardware that most publications no longer cover.
Issue 01 · April 2026
Welcome back. We are restarting a quiet publication that used to live at this address, and we think you will find the new work familiar in spirit.
The site you are reading was, for most of two decades, the home of a small and widely used piece of Windows software. The software is gone. The URL stays. We think there is still an audience for the kind of careful technical writing the old site tried to produce, and we think that audience has been badly served by the last few years of hardware publishing.
We are going to publish slowly. We are going to publish long. We are going to publish when it is finished. If that sounds like what you were hoping existed, pour some coffee. There is a primer below.
Three places to start reading.
If you are new to the journal, these three pieces give you the shape of the thing.
Why we still write about the parallel port.
It is not the hardware that is interesting. It is the specific thinking a direct I/O port still demands of the person using it.
The weight of a single instruction.
Assembly language has not gotten easier. The questions it lets you ask about a program have not gotten less useful.
Notes from a year of firmware postmortems.
Twelve bugs. Six fixed in software. Two fixed in hardware. The rest were fixed, quietly, in the documentation.
The datasheet said the pin could sink 25 mA. The application note, published by the same company six years later, said the pin could sink 25 mA only if. The bug was in the gap between the two documents.
What a datasheet will not tell you about the MCP23017
Read the full piece8051·Z80·68HC11·PIC16F84·AVR ATmega·STM32F4·RP2040·ESP32·MSP430·Parallax Propeller·Raspberry Pi·Arduino Due·BeagleBone·MAX7219·MCP23017·DS1307·Parallel Port·USB-to-Serial·JTAG·SWD·I²C·SPI·CAN·UART·RS-232·RS-485
From the workbench, in passing.
On noise, and the difficulty of finding where it is actually coming from.
A one-afternoon investigation that turned into a two-week chase through the analog front end of a temperature logger. Notes before the formal writeup lands.
The PIC programmer that keeps refusing to die, and what that actually means.
A decade-old programmer, still in daily use, still reliable. The lesson is not nostalgia. The lesson is what made the thing well-engineered in the first place.
What we actually mean when we say “production firmware.”
A short terminology note. The difference between firmware that works and firmware that ships matters more than most engineers quietly acknowledge.
From the journal.
Recent writing. Unscheduled. Arrives when it is finished.
- 8 Best Smart Light Strips for Gaming Rooms (May 2026)
Setting up a gaming room is about more than just a powerful PC and a good monitor. The right lighting can transform an ordinary desk … Read more - 10 Best NEMA 14-50 Outlets for EV Chargers (May 2026)
I have seen too many forum posts from EV owners with melted outlets and scorched wall plates. One Tesla owner on Reddit described finding his … Read more - 40 Best Premium Hose Nozzles for Gardens (2026) Buying Guide
I spent three months testing 40 different premium hose nozzles in my own garden to find out which ones actually deserve your money. After years … Read more - 10 Best Portable EV Chargers for Road Trips (May 2026)
Imagine this: you are driving through the desert on a cross-country road trip in your electric vehicle when you realize you need to charge. The … Read more - 6 Best Outdoor Smart Plugs for Holiday Lights (May 2026)
Running extension cords through cracked windows and freezing your fingers on manual timers is no way to manage holiday lights. I learned this the hard … Read more - 10 Best Gas Pressure Washers for Decks (May 2026) Expert Reviews
Cleaning a wooden deck the wrong way can cause more harm than leaving it dirty. Too much pressure gouges the grain, too little leaves mildew … Read more - 16 Best Headphones for Classical Music Lovers (May 2026) Buying Guide
Classical music presents unique challenges that most headphones simply cannot handle. From the thundering crescendos of a Mahler symphony to the delicate whispers of a … Read more - 10 Best EV Charging Cables for Tesla Owners (May 2026)
Charging your Tesla at home is the single biggest quality-of-life upgrade you can make as an EV owner. No more waiting in line at Superchargers, … Read more - 10 Best Pressure Washers for Driveways (May 2026) Tested & Reviewed
Your driveway takes a beating. Between tire marks, oil stains, moss growth, and years of accumulated grime, that concrete surface can go from curb appeal … Read more - 12 Best Smart Doorbell Chimes for Whole Homes (May 2026) Buyer’s Guide
Missing a package delivery because you could not hear the doorbell from your home office is frustrating. I know the feeling firsthand. After testing doorbell … Read more - 8 Best Premium Streaming Amplifiers for Audiophiles (May 2026)
After three months of listening tests and countless hours comparing specifications, I have reached one conclusion about modern hi-fi. The best premium streaming amplifiers for … Read more - 12 Best Premium Garage Door Insulation Kits (May 2026) Expert Reviews
If you have ever walked into your garage on a July afternoon and felt like you stepped into an oven, you already know the problem. … Read more - 10 Best Premium Garden Hose Reels for Yards (May 2026)
If you have ever spent ten minutes wrestling a tangled garden hose across your yard, you already know why a quality hose reel matters. I … Read more - 6 Best Pipe Cameras for DIY Plumbers (May 2026) Buying Guide
There is nothing quite like the moment you realize your drain is backing up and you have no idea why. I have been there, standing … Read more - 7 Best Active Speakers for Desktop Audio (May 2026) Expert Guide
After spending countless hours at my desk listening to music, editing audio, and gaming, I realized my laptop speakers were doing me a disservice. The … Read more
The catalog.
Four subjects. Every piece on the site lives under one of them.
This domain was first registered in January 2003 as the home of inpout32.dll, a Windows DLL and kernel-mode driver that gave user-level programs direct access to hardware ports on the NT line of Windows. It was written at the moment Microsoft started locking down ring-zero access, and hobbyists still needed a way to talk to the parallel port.
The software was hosted here for the better part of two decades. It was forked many times, academic papers cited it, university coursework linked to it, and every hobbyist project that needed to toggle a pin from user space eventually found its way to the original download page. It quietly became the de facto standard for hardware port access on Windows in an era that no longer exists.
The original site eventually lapsed. The domain became available.
We took the name because the work that happened here mattered, and because the URL had been pointing at a particular kind of technical writing for more than twenty years. Plain, accurate, and useful to the person on the other end of the screen. We intend to keep it pointing in the same direction.
About this journal
Written by a small group who read datasheets for fun and think the best technical writing has been getting rarer, not better. New dispatches arrive when they are finished. The archive grows as it grows.