I make computers do interesting things for me, but I always forget how I did it

  • I’m a mechanical engineer, passionate about optimization, science, and technology. I have a deep appreciation for free software (free as in freedom!), and this blog is both an attempt to give back a little of what I’ve received over the years and a space to keep reminders of how I’ve made computers solve problems for me.
  • I often find myself revisiting answers on Stack Overflow鈥攁nswers I’ve already upvoted. I sometimes wonder how many times I’ve wished I could upvote the same solutions again. With this blog, I aim to create a personal space to write (and consult!) my own answers, whether they’re original or partially borrowed from Stack Overflow 馃檲. My hope is that some of these posts will also be helpful to others.

Convert Excel dates to R

When I load an Excel file as text, dates are loaded as an integer (for example 42705). Converting them to R dates is easy, but I often forget the value I should use in the argument origin to actually make the conversion. This post is to keep the reminder at hand. ...

January 31, 2026 路 1 min 路 Pavodive

Join lines into a long line in emacs

delete-indentation is one of those functions that I often forget. It鈥檚 used to do the opposite of fill-paragraph, usually bound to M-q. ...

January 24, 2026 路 2 min 路 Pavodive

Use flush-lines to eliminate lines in emacs

This is a short post to leave here a piece of knowledge that often escapes me: flush-lines. ...

January 24, 2026 路 1 min 路 Pavodive

Swirly: a CLI-based tool to learn python

This is a very short article to share Swirly, a Command Line Interface-based tool to learn python (or any python package) interactively. ...

April 8, 2025 路 1 min 路 Pavodive

Bash Script for Edition and Exporting of an Org-mode Template

I have a template of a document written as an org file. I have to edit some fields in that file to be able to generate different versions of that document for different people. I export it as a text file to give the feel of a document written with an old-school software and printed with a dot matrix printer. Finally I convert the produced document to PDF. ...

March 30, 2025 路 5 min 路 Pavodive

Adding Page Numbers to a PDF Document

I recently faced the following problem: I had a PDF document created by merging several other documents, many of them containing multiple pages. I needed to display the page numbers in the document. Latex and pdftk to the rescue! ...

March 10, 2025 路 3 min 路 Pavodive

Configure mu4e for gmail accounts in emacs

In this blog post, I want to show how I configured mu4e to read my Gmail accounts in Emacs. ...

February 24, 2025 路 8 min 路 Pavodive

Automating RMarkdown Rendering and PDF Merging with Bash

I work with many RMarkdown files structured within a hierarchy of directories. I needed to render these files to PDF and then use Ghostscript to merge them. This article explains the two small shell scripts I used for the task. ...

February 6, 2025 路 4 min 路 Pavodive

RSS with elfeed in emacs

It was very easy to configure Elfeed in Emacs to have all the blogs and news from the sites I like, together in Emacs. In this short article, I share how I configured the Elfeed package with the RSS feeds of some of the blogs I enjoy reading. This is important for me because I often spend time filtering through a lot of content that I am not interested in on forums like lemmy.ml or reddit.com. Using this method is also a way to avoid ads and go directly to the content I want to see. ...

January 29, 2025 路 3 min 路 Pavodive

Basic Merge Pandas Operations

Merging tables is one of the most common tasks when analyzing data. And yet, I always seem to forget how joins (merges) are done in pandas 馃惣. So here鈥檚 a reminder for future me (and apparently for you, if you happened to land here 馃槈). ...

January 18, 2025 路 5 min 路 Pavodive