Another new and exciting version of our still-new package myman reached CRAN this morning, and has been built for r2u and on r-universe. The matching Python package has also been updated. The package offers twenty one hundred eighty four “My man …” posts by Kevin Kruse made on bsky during the summer of 2026. Each wave picked at one particular public persona. This package wrapse these up in the style of packages like fortunes or gaussfacts.

This release regroups two new waves of posts mocking, respectively, Peter Thiel and Michael Tracy, and make a small update to continuous integration. The short NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.12.0 (2026-10-18)

• New waves eleven (100 posts) and twelve (100 posts) made last week; total is now 2184 posts

• Small update to continuous integration

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. More information is available at the repository or the package page.

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.

I have just released a new version of pcsc-lite 2.5.3.

pcsc-lite is a Free Software implementation of the PC/SC (also known as WinSCard) API for Unix systems. It provides an API for using smart cards and smart card readers.

Yet another way of writing for loops:

    var_a2_4 = ...
    if (var_a2_4 < 0x78) {
        ...
        do {
            ...
            var_a2_4 += 1;
        } while (var_a2_4 < 0x78);
    }

This extra if is merely there because the compiler wasn't able to prove that the variable didn't start below the bound, so it can't rewrite the while-do to a do-while without that extra check. So the rewrite still reads:

for (var_a2_4 = ...; var_a2_4 < 0x78; ++var_a2_4) {
    ...
}

possibly with the initializer skipped, if it comes from something complex earlier.

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1370 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 49.4 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 735 times according to Google Scholar.

This versions updates to the 15.6.2 upstream Armadillo release made yesterday. It, along with 15.6.1 release we incorporated earlier, addresses only minor issues and should not present any user-facing changes. As usual, we did run full reverse-depdency checks against the over 1300 ackages, and did not find anything. As usual, we aim to accommodate the desired CRAN cadences for uploads and try not to exceed six in six months—so we did not ship 15.6.1-1 there. The package has also already been updated for Debian, built for r2u and r-universe, and will build shortly at CRAN for the different binary releases.

All changes since the last CRAN release follow.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.6.2-1 (2026-10-16)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.6.2 (Medium Roast Cortado)

  • Faster inplace addition of eye() expressions

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.6.1-1 [github-only] (2026-10-02)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.6.1 (Medium Roast Cortado)

  • Fix for failures in pinv() when using the (non-default) "std" method

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

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.