Last year, Binary 2.0 Conference had held, and it also held again. There is a book named Binary Hacks (Japanese) that contains many things focused for low-level stuff. Unfortunately, it is a Japanese book, but the English TOC is available. Anyway, Takeshi Yaegashi's presentation is spreading over the world. Engadget's article is a good brief summary.

As a feeble attempt to fight against the Web 2.0 hype that seems to be fueled mostly by AJAX and CNET marketing, people around Tokyo gathered for the Binary 2.0 conference, to discuss about coding in a very low level. The era of Binary 2.0 has come. We are the hard-core binarians, de profundis clamavit. There were presentations of hardware hackingusing VHDL, techniques to inspect and modify code during run-time, and other hard-core binary presentations.IMO, the most impressive presentation was Yaegashi's VHDL hacking, where he did a presentation using GDB controlling a FPGA board doing the VGA output,and explained how he created it using VHDL.