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 Bearded Dragon Enclosures (August 2026) Trusted ReviewsPicking the best reptile enclosures for bearded dragons is one of the most important decisions you’ll make as a new keeper. After testing eight different … Read more
- 8 Best Bird Cages for Parrots (August 2026) Tested & Reviewed
Choosing the best bird cages for parrots is not like picking out a hamster habitat. A parrot will spend most of its life inside this … Read more - 12 Best Horse Saddles for Trail Riding (August 2026) Honest Reviews
After 90 days of riding rocky mountain trails, muddy creek crossings, and 8-hour endurance loops across three states, our team learned one thing: the wrong … Read more - 7 Best Dog Grooming Tables for Home Use (August 2026) Top Reviews
Last , I spent three weekends testing seven dog grooming tables for home use in my garage, my sister’s apartment, and a friend’s backyard setup. … Read more - 10 Best Pet Dryers for Grooming (August 2026) Tested and Reviewed
Bath time with your dog is only half the battle. The real challenge starts when it’s time to dry them off. Towels alone never cut … Read more - 8 Best Wine Racks for Wine Cellars (August 2026) Tested & Reviewed
Building a proper wine cellar means more than picking a cool corner of the basement. The wine racks for wine cellars you choose will determine … Read more - 8 Best Comic Book Storage Boxes for Collections (August 2026) Top Reviews
I’ve spent the last decade watching my comic collection grow from a single drawer to over 4,000 bagged and boarded books spread across my office. … Read more - 8 Best Pet Doors for Large Dogs (August 2026) Trusted Reviews
Large dogs apply a surprising amount of force every time they push through a door, and the cheap plastic frames sold for small pets simply … Read more - 9 Best Dog Houses for Winter (August 2026) Expert Reviews
Last winter, my neighbor’s labrador retriever spent a January night in an uninsulated plastic dog house. By morning, the water bowl had a thin layer … Read more - 8 Best Catios for Indoor Cats (August 2026) Honest Reviews
My two indoor cats used to park themselves at the window every afternoon, tails twitching at the pigeons across the street. I knew they wanted … Read more - 8 Best Pet Strollers for Senior Dogs (August 2026) Expert Reviews
Last , I watched my 12-year-old Labrador struggle to finish our usual morning walk. Halfway down the block, he’d sit down on the sidewalk and … Read more - 8 Best Dog Grooming Clippers for Thick Coats (2026) Trusted Reviews
Grooming a dog with a thick coat can feel like a never-ending battle against shedding, mats, and tangles. If you have a Golden Retriever, Husky, … Read more - 10 Best Stained Glass Kits for Beginners (August 2026) Tested & Reviewed
I picked up my first stained glass kit three years ago on a whim after watching a friend solder a suncatcher at a craft night. … Read more - 12 Best Glass Blowing Kits for Beginners (August 2026) Top Reviews
I still remember the first time I tried to melt glass at home. I bought a cheap setup, no instructions, and ended up with a … Read more - 15 Best Jewelry Making Kits for Adults (August 2026) Trusted Reviews
I spent the last three months working through 15 of the most popular jewelry making kits for adults on Amazon, and what I found surprised … 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.