Movie playback in Latex/Beamer: the current situation with Adobe Reader, Okular and Impress

A few years ago, the only option to include multimedia content in Linux presentations was linking to an external player. While the situation is still far from ideal, we have a few options now:

• Okular has been able to play back movies via mplayer for quite some time now. Features: pause and seek. Downside: poster images appear all black (fixed in KDE 4.10), control bar spacing.
• Adobe Reader can embed external flash players and videos. Features: pause. Downside: Flash, works only with old acroread.
• Open/Libre Office Impress movie playback finally works. Features: presenter console. Downside: plays immediately, pause and seek only outside presentation mode. Also, the LaTeX PDF has to be converted into page images.

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 ;)