| GitHub | https://github.com/coatless |
| Website | https://thecoatlessprofessor.com |
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesbalamuta/ | |
| Threads | @[email protected] |
Closing the loop on last week's Portable #rstats post. Hadley reached out, the conversation went well, attribution is fixed, and the ecosystem gets maintained Portable R builds.
Longer update on the blog...
https://blog.thecoatlessprofessor.com/posts/closing-the-footnote-loop/
RE: https://mastodon.social/@coatless/116343698493079264
A month later, here is what happened to this work.
https://blog.thecoatlessprofessor.com/posts/extraction-with-a-footnote/
I have blocked exactly one person from a project on GitHub. Strong contender for #2 today: a Posit Senior SWE who pointed Claude at my portable-r-macos / portable-r-windows scripts, opened a PR, and linked my work as "existing art."
That's not reference. That's laundering.
Portable R 4.6.0 is now live for Windows and macOS. No installer, no admin, no system changes. Just extract the archive and run.
macOS (Apple Silicon + Intel): https://github.com/portable-r/portable-r-macos/releases/tag/v4.6.0
Windows (x64 + ARM64): https://github.com/portable-r/portable-r-windows/releases/tag/v4.6.0
We're almost there! Pyodios is in App Store review for #iOS. #Python (via #Pyodide) on your iPhone and iPad with matplotlib bundled. Soon you can write notebooks at the coffee shop and plot on the train.
While you wait: https://pyodios.caffeinatedmath.com
STAT 447 was priviliged to have @vincentab deliver a wonderful (and, naturally, impressive) guest lecture on 'Model to Meaning' this week (see below for details). Everybody was ok with recording, so this is now on YouTube. #rstats
Turns out you can fit more than one #Shiny app in an #Electron shell. We gave it three and a launcher screen. R and Python. macOS and Windows. It's a clown car at this point. We keep opening the door and another app gets out.
Holy (native) Grail update, Windows edition: the #Shiny map leads to #Electron desktop apps on Windows 11. #rstats and #python running in shinylive, system, auto-download, and bundled modes, all from one R package. (Container mode sat this one out, VM-in-a-VM said no.)
Coming soon (tm)
RIP Tomáš Kalibera. #rstats lost a huge contributor today. Condolences to his young family.
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2026-April/481617.html
RE: https://mastodon.social/@coatless/116361612129439955
Wrote up the details on how this works under the hood, including how R discovers Rtools through RTOOLS{VER}_HOME and how to point any R installation at a custom Rtools location.
Blog post: https://blog.thecoatlessprofessor.com/posts/portable-r-windows-with-rtools/
Dirk Eddelbuettel