irc.nehmer.net: Charset Change

In the course of technical progress, the IRC server irc.nehmer.net will from now on use a different character set, that is Unicode/UTF-8 instead of the old ISO-8859-1.

As a result, special characters like German umlauts, the sz ligature (ß), or the Euro sign (€) are being encoded differently into the numbers that are used by computers. So antiquated IRC clients not capable of UTF-8 (mIRC among others) will probably display such characters incorrectly. Have a look at the following example:

UTF-8-capable IRC client UTF-8-incapable IRC client 
<Alice> こんにちは。
  <Bob> Hi Alice-san. Had your breakfast yet?
<Alice> Yeah, lots of smørebrød.
  <Bob> So, did you pay much?
<Alice> The price was fair, I paid 2.50€.
 
<Alice> こんいちは。
  <Bob> Hi Alice-san. Had your breakfast yet?
<Alice> Yeah, lots of smørebrød.
  <Bob> So, did you pay much?
<Alice> The price was fair, I paid 2.50€.

The web-based IRC client at http://www.nehmer.net/cgi-bin/irc.cgi has been basically adapted already. Some web browsers, in particular Internet Explorer 5, still may have some problems with the change. If you want to continue using the web-based IRC client anyway, you could use a different browser that doesn't seem to have any problems, for instance Mozilla Browser.

The best solution is to use a completely UTF-8-capable IRC client, such as X-Chat, version 2, which is available for Windows and most other operating systems. For Windows users, we recommend Vaidrius Petrauskas' version, which consists of these two parts:

Quick instructions for installing X-Chat

In order to install X-Chat, perform the following steps:

  1. Download the files mentioned above, and install them in the given order.
  2. Run X-Chat. Initially, X-Chat's so-called server list dialog opens.
  3. Enter your user information in the upper part of the dialog.
  4. The lower part, on the left side, contains a list of the available chat networks. Just below that list, you'll find a checkbox which allows the network list to be edited. Enable that checkbox.
  5. Right above the network list, a new button for adding a network has appeared. Click it. A new network entry appears at the end of the network list, which can be renamed by slowly left-clicking it twice. We suggest NehmerNet.
  6. On the right side of the dialog, there now is a list of servers that belong to the new network. One server entry already exists, which you should, again, rename with two separate left clicks to read exactly irc.nehmer.net.
  7. In the center of the dialog, there is a Join Channels option. Enter the chat channels you wish to join there, separated with commas but without any spaces. E.g. #stardust, or #stardust,#midgard.
  8. Also in the center of the dialog, there is a Character Set option. Choose UTF-8 from the list.
  9. Somewhat below, there is an Auto connect at startup checkboy. Enable that checkbox.
  10. Even further down, there is a No server list on startup checkbox. Enable that checkbox.
  11. Click the big Connect button. That's it!