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.
- 12 Best Brother Embroidery Machines for Monogramming (June 2026)
I have spent the better part of three years testing Brother embroidery machines in my home studio, stitching monograms on everything from baby onesies to … Read more - 10 Best Bunk Beds for Kids Rooms (June 2026) Safe, Sturdy & Stylish Picks
Sharing a bedroom is a reality for millions of siblings, and finding the right sleep setup can make or break bedtime. When I started remodeling … Read more - 8 Best Gel Memory Foam Mattresses for Hot Sleepers (June 2026) Tested & Ranked
If you wake up drenched in sweat every night, the wrong mattress is making things worse. I spent three months testing the best gel memory … Read more - 11 Best Ride-On Fire Trucks for Kids (June 2026) | Tested & Reviewed
Yes, there are plenty of ride-on fire trucks built specifically for kids. These battery-powered vehicles let children as young as 18 months sit inside and … Read more - 10 Best Smart Water Leak Detectors for Basements (June 2026)
I learned the hard way what a basement flood costs. Two years ago, my sump pump failed during a storm while I was at work. … Read more - 15 Best Ranges for Small Kitchens (June 2026) Top Picks
Finding the best ranges for small kitchens changed everything about how I cook in my 70-square-foot galley kitchen. Standard 30-inch ranges simply do not fit … Read more - 10 Best Electric Keyboards for Beginners (June 2026)
Picking your first electric keyboard can feel overwhelming. Walk into any music store or browse Amazon and you’ll find hundreds of options ranging from budget … Read more - 10 Best Hair Straighteners for Thick Hair (June 2026) Tested & Reviewed
Thick hair has a personality of its own. I learned this the hard way after spending three years cycling through straighteners that promised salon results … Read more - 15 Best Bagless Vacuums for Allergy Sufferers (June 2026) HEPA Guide
For anyone who sneezes their way through vacuuming, finding the right machine can feel personal. I have spent the past three months running 15 different … Read more - 6 Best Futons for Small Apartments (June 2026) Tested and Ranked
Finding the best futons for small apartments changed the way I think about tiny living. When I moved into a 350-square-foot studio last year, my … Read more - 7 Best Mattresses for Platform Beds Under $800 (June 2026)
I bought my first platform bed five years ago, and I remember spending hours staring at mattress listings wondering if a $500 foam mattress would … Read more - 12 Best Smart Sensors for Home Security (June 2026) Top Picks
Last summer, my neighbor caught someone testing his back door handle at 2 AM. The intruder moved on when an interior hallway light suddenly clicked … Read more - 9 Best Built-in Dishwashers for Large Families (June 2026)
By the time our family of six finishes dinner on a normal weeknight, the sink looks like a small appliance graveyard. Plates stacked sideways, two … Read more - 7 Best Heat Press Machines for Beginners (June 2026) Tested
Starting a custom apparel project from your kitchen table is one of the most satisfying hobbies I have picked up in . After testing eight … Read more - 12 Best Two Seater Ride-On Cars for Kids (June 2026) Tested & Reviewed
Last Saturday morning, I watched my neighbor’s two kids argue over who got to drive the single-seat Power Wheels first. The older one won, 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.