Paged Out! Institute Blog

Paged Out! #6 is out!

Download Issue #6 on the Issues page. As always, we have cover-art wallpapers too—this time made by the amazing Ninja Jo (Katerina Belikova)!

We meet yet again! Writing this blog post is the last thing I do before a new Issue is pushed out. So when I write these words all the work has been done, all the problems have been solved (or put on the "do this when we have time" TODO list), and most of our Institute is already relaxing (i.e. busy with other stuff) and eagerly awaiting the publication. It's also when all the stress related to trying to finalize the Issue goes away and the happiness related to publishing a new issue sets in. So what I'm saying, is that I feel really happy right now to be able to pass Issue #6 into your hands, and really grateful to our team for what they accomplished with this Issue.

And this Issue is objectively the best Issue up to date! It's a total of 80 pages, with A LOT of absolutely amazing articles and art. Actually one of the delaying factors was that our Menu (Table of Content) script broke again and had to be fixed before pushing the Issue out. It's a good problem to have.

We still don't have the print files / option to buy a printed edition for you – blame the stupid flu/cold season for this (please insert some swear words you like here). We're close, but I still want to order some test prints myself before we start offering these.

Another thing which I personally want to develop more in Paged Out!, is sourcing articles from the following genres: technical explanations of game glitches (think: speedrunning or movement techniques), technical demoscene tricks, and technical radio/HAM/etc. If you have any solid leads or contact in these communities, please hit me up at gynvael@pagedout.institute.

And now, go and enjoy Issue #6! And as usual, the call for articles for Issue #7 is open!

29 March 2025 / Gynvael

Paged Out! #5 is out!

Download Issue #5 on the Issues page. As always, we have cover-art wallpapers too—this time made by the amazing Mark Graham Artist!

You know what's the best birthday present a Paged Out! lead can get? A new issue of Paged Out!—hell yeah! And a non-beta build at that. There are countless improvements over #4, including a better menu, a lot of alignment fixes literally everywhere, better support for long titles, and so on. This said, if you spot any problems, please let us know—there are less of them now and, as such, they are harder to find.

You'll also notice there are a few more Sponsorship Ads this time around. As you might remember, originally we had a policy of having only one ad page per ten content pages. Then the policy changed to round that number up—so for 51 pages, there would be 6 pages of ads. Even with that change, however, we were still in the red with regard to costs. And, as you might also remember, another goal of Paged Out! is to make it self-sustainable (i.e., make it pay its own bills). As such, I made the call to change the ad policy once again and remove the limit altogether. This doesn't mean PO! will be flooded with ads now—I will always try to include the minimum number of ads necessary to ensure PO! isn't in the red (or isn't so much in the red that it becomes a problem). But yes, there are a couple more ads in this issue (9 pages instead of 6 under the old policy).

The next steps for us are (in somewhat random order): rebuilding previous issues with the new engine (to non-beta ones), getting print-ready PDFs in your hands (we are really close to this), and launching the ability to buy Paged Out! from print-on-demand websites (we’re pretty excited about this one, and some test issues have already been printed).

And now, go and enjoy Issue #5! And as usual, the call for articles for Issue #6 is open! (and we have actually already received the first submission yestarday – that was fast).

19 November 2024 / Gynvael

Paged Out! #4 is out!

Download Issue #4 on the Issues page. As always, we have cover-art wallpapers too – this time made by our returning artist from Issue #1 – ReFiend!

One thing we're supper happy with is the expansion to new topics – or rather topics we always wanted to have but never got article submissions for. So with Issue #4 we welcome the "Art" category with amazing pixel and digital art, as well as "Demoscene", which is something I was always excited about!

As usual, this is a Beta1 build, meaning there are some known issues, which we'll slowly work to fix. For example, we know that some links work in some PDFs viewers, but not in other PDF viewers (e.g. KDE Okular seems to have some issues). Our DTP programmer – foxtrot_charlie – mentioned he'll write something about all the headaches of dealing with PDFs, and there are a lot of these. As you know we had a few-day slipup with publication date due to this – sorry about that! Amusingly we had to re-work the cover in the last moment to change as "May" changed into "June" ;).

Enough said – go and enjoy Issue #4! And... call for articles for Issue #5 is open!

1 June 2024 / Gynvael

Paged Out! #3 is out!

Download Issue #3 on the Issues page. We have cover-art wallpapers too!

Unbelievable, isn't it? After 4 years of constant delays, issues, problems, pandemics, etc, Paged Out! got successfully resurrected and is on track once again. The majority of credit for this goes to Aga, our editor-in-chief, who made sure things are happening, processes are working, people are pinged, and has done literally all language-layer reviews! Speaking of reviews, kudos to our review team for going through 50+ articles – shout out to: KrzaQ, disconnect3d, Xusheng Li, Hussein Muhaisen, Max, CVS, and honorary_bot! As Paged Out! is an experimental magazine with an abnormal DTP process, I would especially like to thank our DTP team: foxtrot_charlie (who – I'm sure – at this point thinks in LaTeX and PDF processing), tusiak_charlie, and our advisor wiechu. And last but not least, shout out to Dejan "hebi" who has done a lot of tool programming for PO! over the last years! At the same time multiple other people helped with Issue #3 or Paged Out! in general. As such I would like to thank our previous reviewers and programmers – Mateusz "j00ru" Jurczyk and kele – as well as my executive assistant Arashi Coldwind.

One of the sure things I can say about Paged Out! is that we have wonderful cover artwork. The awesome pixelart in Issue #3 was done by the amazing Ricardo Juchem – checkout his website or follow him on Twitter/X. Also, note that next to the Issue there are two version of the cover-art based wallpaper done by Ricardo – time for a new desktop background perhaps? :)

As you know one of the goals with Paged Out! is to make the zine financially self sufficient. This is where our sponsors and donors come in! As such, special thanks to our amazing sponsors Securitum, Thinkst Canary, and Guided Hacking! And a huge shout out to our donors: celephais, jask, wasp0r, gkelly, madwizard, MrEuds, H Lascelles, and others!

Anyway, we'll let you enjoy Issue #3 now. Note that what we published today is – as usual – a beta build, so expect the PDF to be replaced from time to time with more and more polished versions (we have a bug list to go through). It will take a few more issues for us to polish our PDF processing enough for this to not be necessary, but we're not there yet. We'll write something more about this in a future blog post :).

So, enjoy Issue #3 and let your friends know :)

P.S. Call for articles for Issue #4 is already open! (and we even got some submissions already!)

18 December 2023 / Gynvael

It's late 2023. Time to do something about Paged Out!, isn't?

Almost exactly three years have passed since the last update, and nearly four since the last issue being published. So, what happened? And is this blog entry a glimpse of hope for Issue #3 ever appearing? Or is this just a final entry to sum up the project and officially shut it down?

Let's start with what happened, as you are owed an explanation.

After two initial Issues, I (Gynvael) had the idea to make a "Review Center" app, which would make the whole review process easier and more consistent. As expected, it was months of work and the app was turning out pretty good actually. And then the pandemic started and I was affected pretty badly. Long story short, I had to put aside all projects I had (including Paged Out!), step down as the tech lead / manager at work, and focus on my health. This took a while and afterwards I had some catching up to do.

Fast forward to earlier this year. I left my old job at Google to rest a bit and create my own IT security company. This unlocked some extra time, and this allowed to look in the direction of restarting Paged Out! again. And, given that I had 3 years to think about the project and how to go forward with it, do it right this time.

Let me start by addressing the biggest change, i.e. Paged Out! is now being managed and operated by HexArcana Cybersecurity GmbH – a company fully owned by me. Note that the keywords here are "managed" and "operated by", i.e. the actual ownership of Paged Out! doesn't actually change. This also does not affect the original goal of Paged Out! being a non-profit self-sustaining magazine, nor the important role volunteers will play in its life. So, for the time being, HexArcana will handle accounting, paperwork, and provide management and publishing services for Paged Out!, which should have a positive impact on the magazine's longevity and overall success. That being said, this is only a temporary measure – eventually, in the next few years and once it achieves self-sustainability, I'll move Paged Out! to its own non-profit organization.

The second biggest change stems from two simple facts, which took me a bit to realize: I can only do so many things in a day and also I should never be the single point of failure for a project. Thankfully, there's a simple solution for this.

Without further ado, I would like to officially welcome Aga to the Paged Out! Institute. Aga agreed to help Paged Out! as the Editor-in-Chief, meaning that she'll take over a lot of project management, coordination and editorial work that I have been doing in the past. At the same time, I'm not going anywhere and I will stay with Paged Out! as the overall project lead, publisher, and lead technical editor.

Continuing on the Institute side, you'll notice a lot of changes on the team page – after a 3-year downtime, this is obviously expected. As such, we would like to thank kele, j00ru, and Arashi for all their help with Paged Out! in the past, and wish them all the best in their continued endeavors! At the same time, foxtrot_charlie, tusiak_charlie, hebi, KrzaQ, and disconnect3d are staying with us in similar roles as before.

So, what's going to happen next?

In the next few days, Aga will start contacting folks who expressed interest in helping out with reviewing articles, as well as potential authors. And that's because the call for papers for Issue #3 has been officially re-opened and Paged Out! is considered an active project again!

We would like to thank you for your patience – this has been a long wait for Issue #3, but it will soon be over. For now, consider submitting an article, subscribe to us on Twitter/X, subscribe to our newsletter, or join Gynvael's Discord for updates on our progress!

Let's go!

31 August 2023 / Gynvael

No, seriously, where is Issue #3?

There is good news and bad news. Good news is that Issue #3 is under no danger - it will eventually be published, same as Issue #4, #5 and so on. Bad news is that we've run into delays due to stuff related to paged out, and it's had to make predictions on the exact publishing date apart from "this year" - sorry!

We're basically still finishing the Review Center tool/webapp - this will make work distribution way easier for future issues, so we hope that there will be no such huge delays in the future thanks to this.

Meanwhile, here's a new Review Center related wallpaper by ReFiend:

8 August 2020 / Gynvael