Richy's Random Ramblings – Random ramblings and ravings of Richy B

Code Snippets: UTF-8 to UTF-16 revisited and expanded

June 28, 2026

Yes, I know I posted yesterday about converting from UTF-8 to UTF-16BE/UTF-16LE – but I wasn’t happy with the code to convert to UTF16. It relied on mb_convert_encoding which whilst clear, it did mean that sequences sent could be silently “fixed”, lone high/low surrogate code points would be refused to be output (which I actually needed as they were one thing I was trying to test against!), and I just wanted more “insight” into the whole UTF8 to UTF16 system.

Unicode is NOT UTF-8

One thing to remember (and which caused me a timesink) was that Unicode is NOT UTF-8! Unicode is a collection of characters which are usually represented in UTF-8 byte sequences (but can be represented in UTF-16BE/UTF-16LE and UTF32 and others).

Code Snippets: PHP: Converting to/from UTF-8 to UTF16-BE

June 27, 2026

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I needed to convert some Unicode UTF16-BE strings (as used in Java) to UTF-8 (which is “byte-orientated” and so doesn’t need to worry about endianness) – however, there didn’t seem to many examples online. I’m not going to say these methods are robust, 100% accurate for every use case or even the best way to do it – but just ways to do it.

It’s worth noting that Java uses the escape sequence \uXXXX (where X is a hexadecimal code), and PHP uses the nearly similar escape sequence \u{XXXX} . Both seem to use \xXX for a single character.

ADDED: I’ve improved the UTF-8 to UTF-16 code conversion in a newer post.

Film Review: Superman (2025)

January 30, 2026

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Film Review: Superman (2025)

Superman as played by David Corenswet flying with his face towards the camera

Red bold text reading "Superman" — Title drop!

Whilst I’m not quite managing to watch a film a week (my wife has been ill with, of all things, Kennel Cough – caught from one of our dog’s inoculations!), I have managed to finish watching Superman (2025) – you know the one with Nathan Fillion as Green Lantern/Guy Gardner, Alan Tudyk as Four/Gary, Bradley Cooper as Jor-El, Pom Klementieff as Five, and Sean Gunn as Maxwell Lord: surprisingly it was directed by James Gunn who did Guardians of the Galaxy. I wonder if he has any favourite actors… Oh, it also has David Corenswet as Superman and Nicholas Hoult as Luther.

Casting wise – I think they’ve got Jimmy Olson (Skyler Gisondo) spot on: Lex Luthor (played by 36 year old Nicholas Hoult) is too young and doesn’t quite have the gravitas for Luthor – he’s got the “Modern Doctor Who Master” villain issue of “make him over-excited/manic”: I can’t see how Luthor would have acquired all the funds and technology necessary with that sort of attitude (and age: even if he inherited a large portion). David Corenswet as Superman is okay – they’ve definitely gone for the Christopher Reeves look and feel for him (hair curl, shorts and even the classic theme) and Maria Gabriela de Faria as “The Engineer” (a nano-tech metahuman) has got the semi-mechnanicalish movement, but didn’t quite have the acting ability.

Film Review: The Naked Gun (2025)

January 12, 2026

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A red firey background with metallic like text reading "The Naked Gun" the "UN" of gun is appears under the G at 90 degrees as the joke is they didn't leave enough space for it on the screen. — Title screen of The Naked Gun with the hilarious “error”where they ran out of screen space.

Looking for a film to watch for my (quite possibly short-lived) New Year’s resolution of watching at least one film a week, I stumbled upon the 2025 The Naked Gun with Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson.

Whilst it is a continuation/sequel to the Leslie Neilsen movies, I can’t say the humour was there – I don’t think I laughed once. I did spend quite a lot of the movie thinking “Who is the actor playing Sig Gustafson” (answer: Kevin Durand – who played Vasiliy Fet in the excellent TV series “The Strain“), I didn’t recognise Pamela Anderson at all (despite being a young teen in the 80s/90s when Baywatch/Barbed Wire was available: neither really interested me, but the she was plastered everyway) and did have a bit of a smile when Weird Al’s customary Naked Gun cameo was made and a little smile when Dave Bautista made his small cameo – but that was about it.

Bug Report [Fixed]: WordPress Plugin “miniOrange Broken Link Checker” syntax errors

December 16, 2023

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In an effort to prove to myself that I am actually trying to do work this month, I’m making a note of all the bugs in 3rd party software I find.

Today is a bug reported the developers of the miniOrange Broken Link Checker | Finder WordPress Plugin on the 11th June 2022 through the WordPress plugin forum about database syntax issues being caused in the version 2.1 of that plugin.