My calendar has had a fun and silly event marked on it for the end of 2022 for .. a while.

Four years ago I spent part of the holiday break implementing BOCU-1 (an obscure unicode encoding). Just for kicks, because it's cute and interesting.

Of course, it was patented! But the patent had a royalty-free promise associated with it and was near expiry anyway. After a year of runaround trying to get said royalty-free license (including briefly hiring a patent lawyer) I decided just to wait until the patent expired.

Last month it finally did! So I have finally published this most gratuitously delayed, expensive, tiny, mostly-useless crate: https://crates.io/crates/bocu1

(cc @manishearth possibly the only person in the world who could be interested in its content)