A fairly decent poster in Inkscape

Input: nicely polished LaTeX/Beamer slides from the last conference presentation. No concept at all yet. The poster is due in 5 days.
I used to do posters with LaTeX/geometry, but that only works if you have lots of text and a plan. Trying this approach with throwing lots of figures on your empty canvas and shuffling them around is a nightmare.

HTML directory of PDF files

The file names for my PDF presentations contain only my name and the presentation date. Having to sort through a hundred meeting write-ups when looking for a specific bit of data is annoying, so I wrote a python script to put title, author, modification date and a link to the file into a HTML table.

Upgrading to VLC 2.0 on Ubuntu 11.04 with checkinstall

There doesn't seem to be an official Debian package yet (at least I couldn't find a natty ppa), so I installed from source with checkinstall.
Checkinstall (instead of make install) creates a local .deb package, which can be uninstalled via dpkg -s vlc when the official repositories catch up.
The configure script kept popping up with missing packages, so I posted a list here. It's probably not complete (depending on what I had installed already) and might include a few unnecessary dev packages. Anyway, missing packages can usually be resolved by  aptitude search <keyword>.
Checkinstall failed at first being unable to create /usr/local/include/vlc and not finding vlc-cache-gen  (source). Afterwards, vlc crashed at startup missing some libraries, which had ended up in /usr/local/lib instead of /usr/lib, so I had to create a few symbolic links (source).

Eee PC 1015 disassembly

As previously mentioned, I'll not take apart my ASUS U43 unless I absolutely have to. However, one of my friends had an Eee PC with a possibly broken DC jack, so we decided to have a look.

Asus Bamboo disassembly

I don't want to try this until I absolutely have to, but I found a short disassembly guide for my Asus U43jc hidden in an insanely long forum thread (page 188, user tenchi71):

Kmail opens hyperlinks in two browser tabs

I found the solution on the KDE community forums: Go to System Settings->Default Applications->Web Browser (not KMail settings) and remove the '%U' argument.

batch convert svg->pdf with Inkscape

for file in *.svg; do inkscape -z -f=$file -A=${file/.svg/.pdf}; done
In other words, RTFM ;)

Corrupted directory on NTFS partition

...which I hadn't done for 6 weeks (expect snarky comments from daWuzzzz below). Imagine my joy when Kubuntu came up with I/O errors trying to open my research data directory. Of course, it had to be the single most important directory on my computer, everything else on my NTFS partition was fine. And of course it had to happen at 2am. Windows wasn't more helpful and just displayed a 'corrupted directory' message. In retrospect, I suspect a damaged master file table. A quick summary of last night: