fidzu : debian

Via (I think) @mcc on the Fediverse, I learned of GetMusic: a sort-of "clearing house" for Free Bandcamp codes. I think the way it works is, some artists release a limited set of download codes for their albums in order to promote them, and GetMusic help them to keep track of that, and helps listeners to discover them.

GetMusic mail me occasionally, and once they highlighted an album The Arcane & Paranormal Earth which they described as "Post-Industrial in the vein of Coil and Nurse With Wound with shades of Aphex Twin, Autechre and assorted film music."

Well that description hooked me immediately but I missed out on the code. However, I sampled the album on Bandcamp directly a few times as well as a few of his others (Ye Gods is a side-project of Antoni Maiovvi, which itself is a pen-name) and liked them very much. I picked up the full collection of Ye Gods albums in one go for 30% off.

Here's a stand-out track:

On Earth by Ye Gods

So I guess this service works! Although I didn't actually get a free code in this instance, it promoted the artist, introduced me to something I really liked and drove a sale.

16 Jan 2026 10:14am GMT

Version 0.0.25 of RcppSpdlog arrived on CRAN right now, and will be uploaded to Debian and built for r2u shortly along with a minimal refresh of the documentation site. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn more at the nice package documention site.

This release fixes a minuscule cosmetic issue from the previous release a week ago. We rely on two #defines that R sets to signal to spdlog that we are building in the R context (which matters for the R-specific logging sink, and picks up something Gabi added upon my suggestion at the very start of this package). But I use the same #defines to now check in Rcpp that we are building with R and, in this case, wrongly conclude R headers have already been installed so Rcpp (incorrectly) nags about that. The solution is to add two #undefine and proceed as normal (with Rcpp controlling and taking care of R header includion too) and that is what we do here. All good now, no nags from a false positive.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.25 (2026-01-15)

• Ensure #define signaling R build (needed with spdlog) is unset before including R headers to not falsely triggering message from Rcpp

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report detailing changes. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

15 Jan 2026 1:20pm GMT

A brand new release 0.1.15 of the RcppSimdJson package is now on CRAN.

RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is 'faster than CPU speed' as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon.

This version updates to the current 4.2.4 upstream release. It also updates the RcppExports.cpp file with 'glue' between C++ and R. We want move away from using Rf_error() (as Rcpp::stop() is generally preferable). Packages (such as this one) that are declaring an interface have an actual Rf_error() call generated in RcppExports.cpp which can protect which is what current Rcpp code generation does. Long story short, a minor internal reason.

The short NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.15 (2026-01-14)

• simdjson was upgraded to version 4.2.4 (Dirk in #97

• RcppExports.cpp was regenerated to aid a Rcpp transition

• Standard maintenance updates for continuous integration and URLs

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

14 Jan 2026 4:11pm GMT