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.
- 7 Best Ride-On ATVs for Toddlers (July 2026) Buying Guide
Finding the best ride-on ATVs for toddlers means balancing fun with safety, and after testing more than a dozen models with our kids over the … Read more - 15 Best French Door Refrigerators with Dual Ice Makers (July 2026)
Finding the best French door refrigerators with dual ice makers changed how my family handles hosting duties and weekly meal prep. After swapping out a … Read more - 9 Best Heat Presses for Tumblers and Mugs (July 2026) Top Picks
Finding the best heat presses for tumblers and mugs used to mean sorting through dozens of forums, sketchy Amazon listings, and conflicting advice from craft … Read more - 13 Best Electric Razors for Shaving Heads (July 2026) Top Bald Head Shavers
Shaving your head every morning should take minutes, not a fight with a manual razor that leaves nicks, bumps, and frustration. I have spent the … Read more - 12 Best Telescopes with GoTo Mounts (July 2026) Ranked
Finding celestial objects by star-hoping across the night sky can take hours, and most beginners give up before they ever see a galaxy. That is … Read more - 10 Best Mattresses for Platform Beds Twin Size (July 2026) Buying Guide
Finding the right mattress for a twin platform bed changes everything about how a small bedroom, guest room, or kids room actually sleeps. Platform beds … Read more - 10 Best Ride-On Lawn Mower Toys for Kids (July 2026)
When my nephew turned three, all he wanted to do was follow his dad around the yard on Saturday mornings with the real mower. That … Read more - 10 Best Smart Locks for Smart Homes (July 2026) Buying Guide
Upgrading your front door with one of the best smart locks for smart homes is the single fastest way to add real convenience and accountability … Read more - 12 Best Wine Coolers for Home Bars (July 2026) Tested Guide
Finding the best wine coolers for home bars completely changed how I entertain. I used to stash reds on a rack in the pantry and … Read more - 10 Best Bernina Sewing Machines for Professionals (July 2026)
When you sew for a living, your machine is not a hobby purchase, it is your income source. Finding the best Bernina sewing machines for … Read more - 8 Best Mandolins for Beginners (July 2026) Hands-On Reviewed
Finding the best mandolins for beginners in is harder than it looks, especially when cheap options show up with unplayable setups and dead strings straight … Read more - 7 Best Foot Massagers for Circulation (July 2026) Tested and Reviewed
If you have ever peeled off your shoes after a twelve-hour shift and felt your feet throb with every heartbeat, you already understand why circulation … Read more - 8 Best Astronomy Binoculars for Beginners (July 2026) Expert Picks
Looking up at the night sky is one of those simple joys that never gets old, and the right pair of binoculars can turn a … Read more - 12 Best Storage Benches for Entryways (July 2026) Buying Guide
Walking through a cluttered entryway with shoes scattered across the floor, bags piled on a console, and no place to sit while tying your shoes, … Read more - 8 Best Mattresses in a Box for Back Pain (July 2026) Tested & Reviewed
Back pain affects roughly 65 million Americans, and the wrong mattress can make those stiff, achy mornings a daily reality. After testing 8 of 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.