unicode

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)!

#introduction

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)!

#introduction

A(nimal Cros)SCII: mapping the character encoding for Animal Crossing GC town, player, and passwords to Unicode characters.

👉 https://sethmlarson.dev/animal-crossci

#animalcrossing #gamecube #retrogaming #unicode

ALT

In the old #ASCII days, you could change a letter between upper and lower case by XORing its character code with 0x20. Of course, if you tried this with anything that wasn't a letter, you'd get nonsense results.

If you try that with #Unicode code points, it sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't. But Unicode can deliver much more impressive nonsense when it doesn't.

A fun example I just found: the "lower-case" version of CAR is NO PEDESTRIANS.

>>> chr(ord('🚗') ^ 0x20)
'🚷'

Euler’s number is often depicted as e or γ, and the Euler-Mascheroni constant is often C or γ.

Unicode has a character EULER CONSTANT ℇ.

It looks… nothing like C, e, or γ.

It’s historical baggage from our dear friends at Xerox, and… apparently noone knows which Euler’s constant they wanted ℇ to be?!

https://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2002-m04/0073.html

#lang_en #unicode #math

#Introduction post for my own Mastodon instance!

• I’m a 44-year-old jack-of-all-trades.
• I grew up in #HongKong, lived in the #US. My partner of 14 years and I moved to #Taiwan in 2020.
• We are “parents” to one remaining dog.
• I speak 6 #languages, and have dabbled in many others.
• Things I will nerd out about: #Unicode, #typography, #typhoons.
• I am a person of faith, but not a fan of organized religions.
• I type in #Dvorak.
• I curate pop music at @soniccruise.

ALT

ALT

ALT

ALT

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!

ALT

ALT

ALT

ALT