The Three Devs & A Maybe podcast (with hosts Michael Budd, Fraser Hart, Lewis Cains and Edd Mann) has posted their latest episode (#24) talking about character sets and encodings.

Having only just recently been bit by the character encoding issue again, we thought it would be a good time to bring it up on the podcast. Starting from the beginning with ASCII, we move on to discuss how 8-bit compatible machines brought way to the ISO-8859-* standards. This leads us on to Unicode, with the goal to develop a single character-set encoding standard that could support all of the world's scripts. Finally, we discuss the de-factor character encoding implementation used on the web today 'UTF-8', and reasons why this is the case.

Lots of different topics are mentioned including reversing a Unicode String in PHP using UTF-16BE/LE, portable UTF-8 and a YouTube video covering Pragmatic Unicode. You can listen to this new episode though the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to their feed.