Three small announcements:
1. RFC 9839, a guide to which Unicode characters you should never use: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9839.html
2. Blog piece with background and context, “RFC 9839 and Bad Unicode”: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/08/14/RFC9839
3. A little Go library that implements 9839’s exclusion subsets: https://github.com/timbray/RFC9839
unicode
Did you know that new #Emoji can be proposed by anyone, simply by following some guidelines laid out by the #Unicode consortium? There's a time window each year where they accept proposals, and a select few might make it into future sets.
This year I turned one in: "Circuit Board", which I was surprised to find 1. didn't exist and 2. had not been proposed before (though CPU and Microchip have both been submitted and declined in the last 5 years)
You can read my proposal here:
https://storage.googleapis.com/greg-kennedy.com/Proposal%20for%20Emoji%20%E2%80%9CCircuit%20Board%E2%80%9D.pdf
and you can see the Unicode emoji proposal guidelines here:
https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html
Anyway, the odds aren't great of getting accepted, but if it IS then you can say "hey! I know the guy who submitted that one!"
Attached are the sample images I drew up for the proposal - which, incidentally, are now Public Domain as well. Enjoy!

I had an idea, and now I’m wondering… how well could this approach scale…?

#lang_en #input #gnu #linux #lignux #x11 #unicode #ime
Hello, I'm an open source software engineer in my late 30s living in #Seoul, #Korea, and an avid advocate of #FLOSS and the #fediverse.
I'm the creator of @fedify, an #ActivityPub server framework in #TypeScript, and @hollo, a fediverse microblog for single users.
I'm also very interested in East Asian languages (so-called #CJK) and #Unicode. Feel free to talk to me in #English, #Korean (#한국어), or #Japanese (#日本語), or even in Literary Chinese (#文言文/#漢文)!
Hello, I'm an open source software engineer in my late 30s living in #Seoul, #Korea, and an avid advocate of #FLOSS and the #fediverse.
I'm the creator of @fedify, an #ActivityPub server framework in #TypeScript, and @hollo, an ActivityPub-enabled microblogging software for single users.
I'm also very interested in East Asian languages (so-called #CJK) and #Unicode. Feel free to talk to me in #English, #Korean (#한국어), or #Japanese (#日本語), or even in Literary Chinese (#文言文, #漢文)!
A(nimal Cros)SCII: mapping the character encoding for Animal Crossing GC town, player, and passwords to Unicode characters.