Posts – A blog by RC

Raspberry Pi: Private Network, Media Server and Home Automation (Hotel-friendly)

Raspberry Pi

Networking

DIY

Set up a private local network from public Wi‑Fi using a travel router and a Raspberry Pi – includes Jellyfin media server, Samba shares, Home Assistant, and monitoring.

Becoming a power user - Episode 1: A dream and Vim

As I mentioned in the previous post in this series, the first step toward full customization of my workstation was installing the VSCode Vim extension

Becoming a power user - Episode 0: why this even

Blog

There is something very satisfying about watching someone be really good at something (Mike Trapp, 2020). That’s exactly what I was thinking every time I’d look over the…

Diff between files with process substitution

A cool trick for comparing code using process substitution

My 2025: full timeline

news

See this post for a much shorter review of 2025, with my highlights for the year and a theme for 2026.

Looking back at 2025

news

2025 has come to an end, and it was even more eventful than 2024. I thought I’d do another “year in review” like I did in 2024, but since it ended up much longer than I…

TIL: Categorical, String, and Object in Pandas

Python

Pandas

In the process of adding support for Pandas 3.0 (specifically, the object-to-str migration) to skrub, I have been exposed to more fun and quirky ™ features of Pandas than…

Experiments plotting my top Last.fm artists

Following from my previous post on fetching my Last.fm scrobbles (check it out here if you want to see how I did it), I now have more than ten years’ worth of data and no…

EuroSciPy 2025: thinking back on the event and my tutorial

The week of EuroSciPy 2025 has just ended, and now it’s time to take stock of all the various talks I attended, those that I missed out on, and some other personal…

SODA Kickoff: a new slide deck for skrub

news

Today we had the SODA Kickoff, an event organized by some of the PIs (I still don’t know what “PI” stands for, other than that it’s not “private investigator”) of the Inria…

New publication: Retrieve, Merge, Predict

academia

news

Almost exactly two years in the making, our paper “Retrieve, Merge, Predict - Augmenting tables with data lakes” has finally been published in TMLR: you may find it here.

Fetching and preparing Last.fm data for beautiful data visualizations

code

data visualization

One of the things I enjoy the most about my job is having the opportunity of turning data into images, coming up with ways to tell myself and others a story.

New blog post: testing Skrub categorical encoders

news

skrub

I wrote a new blog post on the Skrub materials website!

Theorycrafting for Blade and Soul: introduction and damage formula

code

games

blade and soul

Videogames are my biggest passion, and trying to play well is something I do whenever I enjoy a game. For me, minmaxing is part of the fun.

Becoming a power user - Episode 2: zee my shell

In this second instalment of the “Becoming a power user” series, I’ll cover my switch from being a casual terminal (bash) user to a slightly less casual user of zsh, Oh My…

2024 wrapped: ups, downs, and some changes

news

It’s the end of the year, so I decided I had to do my semestral wrestling bout with Hugo to go over what happened in the past 12 months.

My 2024 (so far) in academia

Disclaimer: this post will mostly be a rant. The reasons for it should become sufficiently clear as I go over my experience in the past few months.

Moving up… or sideways?

news

So, my postdoc is about to end (just a few more weeks left), and it seems like my next position has been decided! I will be a research engineer at P16, a development unit…

New story on Medium: Retrieve, Merge, Predict

news

I wrote a blog post on Medium! It summarizes most of the work we did in a more digestible format than an academic paper.

New submission: Retrieve, Merge Predict at VLDB2024

news

We submitted a revised version of our benchmarking paper to VLDB 2024, with the title “Retrieve, Merge, Predict: Augmenting Tables with Data Lakes”.

Some updates

news

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? According the newly added archives page, the latest post in this blog goes back all the way to July 2022… Well, it does not seem like I kept my…

Studying the temperature readings

raspberry

IoT

In this notebook, I will take a look at the readings from a DHT22 temperature-humidity sensor that I have left for a few days in a couple of locations in my house. As I’m…

Coding the Thermometer

raspberry

In this post, I will describe the code I have developed to run the thermometer, log the data and save it in such a way that it can be used to carry out some (limited)…

Preparing a Raspberry-based thermometer setup

raspberry

arduino

The device, and the accessories.

Introducing EmbDI

embdi

Out of all the work I’ve carried out during my PhD, EmbDI is by far the most important contribution. I’ve dedicated about half of PhD years working on designing, developing…

Something about this blog

Introduction

The idea behind the blog is having a single place where I can put posts on stuff that interests me, or things I have learned over time, or weird side projects I embark in…