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 Sewage Pumps for Basement Bathrooms (October 2026) Ultimate Guide
A basement bathroom has one big advantage over a bathroom upstairs: nobody walks past it to use it. It has one big disadvantage too. Every … Read more - 8 Best Well Pumps for Shallow Wells (October 2026) Ultimate Guide
A shallow well pump is an above-ground jet pump that pulls water up by suction, and that suction only works while the water sits within … Read more - 12 Best Tankless Water Heaters for Whole House (October 2026) Ultimate Guide
If you have ever stood under a shower that went lukewarm because someone else started the laundry, you already know why whole house tankless water … Read more - 10 Best Electric Tankless Water Heaters Under $500 (October 2026) Ultimate Guide
The best electric tankless water heaters under 500 dollars are genuinely good units, not disposable ones, but only if you match the model to how … Read more - 12 Best Rain Shower Heads for Walk-In Showers (October 2026) Ultimate Guide
Last updated . A walk-in shower has more ceiling height, more floor area and usually a frameless glass enclosure than a standard tub-shower combo, and … Read more - 10 Best Smart Blinds for Bedrooms (October 2026) Ultimate Guide
Ask ten people shopping for the best smart blinds for bedrooms what mattered most, and nine will say the same two things before they mention … Read more - 11 Best Quiet Ceiling Fans for Nurseries (October 2026) Ultimate Guide
The first thing I noticed when I started sorting ceiling fans for a nursery was how few of them are actually quiet. Most listings say … Read more - 6 Best Smart Smoke and CO Detectors (October 2026) Ultimate Guide
Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms are the cheapest safety device in your house and the easiest to install yourself. The smart versions add phone alerts, … Read more - 10 Best Ceiling Fans With Lights for Bedrooms (October 2026) Ultimate Guide
A bedroom ceiling fan has one job that a living room fan does not: it has to run all night without waking anyone up. That … Read more - 10 Best Low Profile Ceiling Fans for Low Ceilings (October 2026) Ultimate Guide
If your ceilings sit at 8 feet or less, a standard downrod fan will put its blades uncomfortably close to the floor, and most people … Read more - 12 Best LED Wall Sconces for Hallways (October 2026) Honest Reviews
A hallway is the one room in most homes that gets lighting decisions by accident. Somebody hardwired a single fixture years ago, it flickers, the … Read more - 10 Best Motion Sensor Lights for Garages (October 2026) Ultimate Guide
The fastest way to stumble into a dark garage is to reach for a light switch you cannot find. A motion sensor garage light removes … Read more - 12 Best Bathroom Vanity Lights for Mirrors (October 2026) Ultimate Guide
Most people pick a bathroom light the way they pick a throw pillow: they see one they like online and order it, then discover the … Read more - 10 Best Sump Pumps for Basements (October 2026) Ultimate Guide
Every basement has one component that stands between groundwater and your finished walls, and that component is a sump pump. It is also the single … Read more - 6 Best Heat Pump Water Heaters for Garages (October 2026) Ultimate Guide
A heat pump water heater is the rare appliance that actually gets better the further you move it from the living space. A basement closet … 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.