Alex’ Homepage

I wanted to share a neat trick that I found to be working great for OpenOffice Impress presentations. I’m using the Presenter Console under Ubuntu, i.e. two screens, and wanted to show on mouse click videos at full screen resolution (on the video beamer screen, of course). In addition to that, I wanted to include videos with a relative path, i.e., relative with respect to the presentation (.odp) file. I finally managed to do this by writing a generic makro which calls a bash script that runs mplayer. For each video file in the presentation, I added an additional one-liner makro with the video path. Then, in the presentation, I would insert an image (e.g., sample frame of the video, but this can also be anything else, text, buttons etc.) and add a makro action (right click on the object or image -> interaction -> action at mous click = run macro) which would correspond to the makro containing the (relative) path to the video I would like it to play.

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Lately, I took an opportunity to do skydiving. A tandem jump from the airplane at 4000m . I edited the raw video from the jump and put it online. As music, I used my song “Lately”.

I finished writing my PhD thesis. Now I’m getting ready for the thesis defense which will take place 31 July. I added the final statistics of my writing advances.

These are the final statistics of my thesis writing advances.

People keep asking “And .. how many pages?”. Well, therefore a little update on my advances concerning my thesis writing. It seems that I’m getting closer to a final version! In the statistics, you can see for roughly two months the work stagnating. During that time, I concentrated again on some project work that benefited also my dissertation. This explains the sudden increase recently .

Statistics of my thesis writing advances

I thought of making a plot that shows my advances in writing my PhD thesis. After some tweaking, voilà, here it is. There are some interesting things to note, for example the intense writing period beginning of February .. but maybe you should have a look yourself.