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 Sunglasses for Motorcycle Riders (August 2026) Expert Picks
I still remember the first time a beetle hit my eye shield at 65 mph. Regular sunglasses had failed me again: they fogged up going … Read more - 10 Best Golf Sunglasses for Bright Conditions (August 2026) Expert Reviews
I still remember the round that forced me to take sunglasses seriously. Three hours into a brutal midday round at a desert course, I was … Read more - 8 Best Rolling Carry-On Backpacks for Pilots (August 2026) Top Reviews
I’ll never forget my first month as a regional first officer, hauling a regulation rolling suitcase through the Denver airport while my flight bag dug … Read more - 8 Best Percussion Massagers for Seniors (August 2026) Top Reviews
After my mother turned 72, mornings got harder for her. She would shuffle from her bedroom to the kitchen holding onto the wall, wincing when … Read more - 8 Best Gaming Laptops for Aspiring Streamers (August 2026) Trusted Reviews
Last year I helped three friends build their first Twitch channels, and the single biggest mistake I watched them make was buying a “gaming laptop” … Read more - 10 Best Steel Knife Sets for Outdoor Cooking (August 2026) Honest Reviews
I have been running a serious outdoor cooking setup for the past 7 years, and I have lost count of how many camp kitchens I … Read more - 8 Best Fishing Sunglasses for Offshore Anglers (August 2026) Honest Reviews
I lost count of how many times a giant blue marlin got away from me because I could not see the bait in the water. … Read more - 10 Best Commuter Backpacks for Architects (August 2026) Top Reviews
I have been there. Trying to fit an A3 portfolio, a 16-inch laptop, three sketchbooks, a scale ruler set, and a foamcore model into a … Read more - 8 Best Carving Knives for Thanksgiving (August 2026) Trusted Reviews
Three Thanksgivings ago, I watched my dad wrestle with a dull chef’s knife, tearing the breast meat instead of slicing it. The juices bled out … Read more - 8 Best Doorbell Cameras with Facial Recognition (August 2026) Expert Reviews
Facial recognition technology has transformed how we secure our homes, bringing intelligent identification right to our front doors. After testing dozens of smart doorbells over … Read more - 8 Best Home Theater Speaker Systems for Movie Buffs (August 2026) Top Reviews
I have spent more Friday nights than I can count rewiring my living room trying to chase that cinema feeling at home. After testing dozens … Read more - 10 Best Earbuds for Triathletes (August 2026) Tested & Reviewed
I still remember my first triathlon with the wrong headphones. I jumped into the pool with a pair of “sweatproof” earbuds and watched them float … Read more - 8 Best Hiking Daypacks for National Park Trips (August 2026) Trusted Reviews
I spent the last three months testing daypacks across five national parks, from the granite valleys of Yosemite to the high-altitude trails of Rocky Mountain. … Read more - 8 Best Deep-Kneading Foot Massagers (August 2026) Honest Reviews
If your feet ache by the end of a long workday, you already know how hard it is to find relief that actually works. After … Read more - 10 Best Keyless Entry Locks for Smart Homes (August 2026) Honest Reviews
Your front door is the weakest link in your home security, and roughly 30% of burglars walk right through it. After spending six weeks testing … 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.