fidzu : debian

When I wrote about the redhat logo in a shell prompt, a commenter said it would be nice to achieve something similar for Debian, and suggested "🍥" (U+1F365 FISH CAKE WITH SWIRL DESIGN) which, in some renderings, looks to have a red swirl on top. This is not bad, but I thought we could do better.

On Apple systems, the character "" (U+F8FF) displays as the corporate Apple logo. That particular unicode code point is reserved: systems are free to use it for something private and internal, but other systems won't use it for the same thing. So if an Apple user tries to send a document with that character in it to someone else, they won't see the Apple unless they are also viewing it on an Apple computer. (Some folks use it for Klingon).

Here's a font that maps the Debian swirl to the same code point. It's covered by the Debian logo license terms.

Nerd Font maps the Debian swirl logo to codepoints e77d, f306, ebc5 and f08da (all of which are also in the Private Use Area). I've gone ahead and mapped it to all those points but the last one (simply because I couldn't find it in FontForge.)

Note that, unless your recipients have this font, or the Nerd Font, or similar set up, they aren't going to see the swirl. But enjoy it for private use. Getting your system to actually use the font is, I'm afraid, left as an exercise for the reader (but feel free to leave comments)

Thanks to mirabilos for chatting to me about this back in 2019. It's taken me that long to get this blog post out of draft!

13 Mar 2026 10:11pm GMT

Another maintenance release of the RcppCNPy package arrived on CRAN today, and has already been built as an r2u binary. RcppCNPy provides R with read and write access to NumPy files thanks to the cnpy library by Carl Rogers along with Rcpp for the glue to R.

The changes are minor and similar to other recent changes. We aid Rcpp in the transition away from calling Rf_error() by relying in Rcpp::stop() which has better behaviour and unwinding when errors or exceptions are encountered. So once again no user-facing changes. Full details are below.

Changes in version 0.2.15 (2026-03-13)

• Replaced Rf_error with Rcpp::stop in three files

• Maintenance updates to continuous integration

CRANberries also provides a diffstat report for the latest release. As always, feedback is welcome and the best place to start a discussion may be the GitHub issue tickets page.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

13 Mar 2026 7:10pm GMT

As an opportunity to rewire my brain from "docker" to "podman" and "buildah" I started to create an image build with an ECH enabled curl at https://gitlab.com/hoexter-experiments/ech.

Not sure if it helps anyone, but setup should be like this:

git clone https://gitlab.com/hoexter-experiments/ech
cd ech
buildah build --layers -f Dockerfile -t echtest
podman run -ti echtest /usr/local/bin/curl \
  --ech true --doh-url https://one.one.one.one/dns-query \
  https://crypto.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace.cgi
fl=48f121
h=crypto.cloudflare.com
ip=2.205.251.187
ts=1773410985.168
visit_scheme=https
uag=curl/8.19.0
colo=DUS
sliver=none
http=http/2
loc=DE
tls=TLSv1.3
sni=encrypted
warp=off
gateway=off
rbi=off
kex=X25519

It also builds nginx and you can use that for a local test within the image. More details in the README.

13 Mar 2026 2:16pm GMT