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.
- 10 Best Spotting Scopes for Target Shooting (June 2026) Buying Guide
Walking downrange after every group to check where your shots landed wastes range time and breaks your shooting rhythm. That is exactly the problem the … Read more - 10 Best Hair Dryers for Frizzy Hair (June 2026) Top Picks
Frizzy hair is one of the most frustrating things to manage, and the wrong dryer can actually make the problem worse. When the hair cuticle … Read more - 12 Best Wood Stoves for Cabin Heating (June 2026) Expert Reviews
When the grid goes down and the temperature drops to 28 degrees Fahrenheit, a reliable wood stove becomes the difference between a cozy retreat and … Read more - 10 Best Epilators for Long Lasting Hair Removal (June 2026) Top Picks
Finding the best epilators for long lasting hair removal used to mean choosing between painful waxing appointments or razors that left stubble by the next … Read more - 15 Best Serger Machines for Finishing Seams (June 2026) Buying Guide
I have spent the better part of three years testing serger machines on everything from delicate silk chiffon to four layers of denim, and the … Read more - 9 Best Down Comforters for Winter (June 2026) Reviews
Winter nights have a way of exposing every weak spot in your bedding. I spent three winters freezing under thin comforters before I finally bit … Read more - 10 Best Handheld Steam Cleaners for Tile Floors (June 2026) Tested
I spent six weeks testing handheld steam cleaners on grimy grout lines, bathroom tile, kitchen backsplashes, and sealed hardwood to find models that actually deliver … Read more - 8 Best Classical Guitars for Fingerstyle Players (June 2026) Buying Guide
Fingerstyle guitar demands an instrument that responds to the smallest touch, and that is exactly why so many players turn to nylon-string classical guitars. When … Read more - 10 Best Telescopes Under $500 for Beginners (June 2026) Top Picks
Getting into astronomy does not have to drain your bank account. The best telescopes under $500 for beginners open up the moon’s craters, Saturn’s rings, … Read more - 12 Best Nightstands with Charging Stations (June 2026) Buying Guide
Every night, millions of us fumble in the dark for a charging cable, trip over extension cords, or wake up to a phone that never … Read more - 8 Best Smart Shades for Bedroom Windows (June 2026) Quiet and Blackout
I have spent the better part of two years turning my bedroom into a sleep lab, testing every motorized window treatment I could fit through … Read more - 15 Best Handheld Carpet Cleaners for Stairs (June 2026) Top Picks
I have spent the better part of the last year dragging every portable spot cleaner I could find up and down my own carpeted staircase, … Read more - 6 Best Weighted Blankets for Adults (June 2026) Expert Reviews
I spent three months sleeping under six different weighted blankets to find out which ones actually deliver on the promise of better sleep. Some nights … Read more - 15 Best Computerized Telescopes for Deep Sky Viewing (June 2026)
Finding faint galaxies, wispy nebulae, and distant star clusters by eye is one of the hardest parts of amateur astronomy. The best computerized telescopes deep … Read more - 15 Best Makeup Vanities with Lights (June 2026) Reviews & Buying Guide
Finding the best makeup vanities with lights can transform your daily getting-ready routine from a guessing game into a smooth, professional experience. After spending weeks … 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.