Wide Characters

Here's how to output wide characters (i.e., wchar_t) to the console in Visual Studio 2010 using a Multi-Byte character set environment. Most likely, this option must be set manually since Microsoft suggest Unicode by default. This setting prevents certain functions from being changed to their <method>W versions but i guess that's a matter of taste. All it takes is a single call to _setmode() with the second parameter indicating the expected character type. In the case of UTF-16 (two bytes) this is _O_U16TEXT. After that, the character type can be switched back to ASCII using the _O_TEXT option.

:: CODE BLOCK ::

_setmode(_fileno(stdout), _O_U16TEXT);
std::wcout<<L"Hello World"<<L"\n";  
_setmode(_fileno(stdout), _O_TEXT);  

Wide Character Output

Of course, the console's font must be set to something that can handle all used characters (e.g., Lucida Sans Unicode). The complete Unicode table can be found ▷here.

Universal Joint

Concept model and example animation of a universal joint. Note the non-linear force transmission for greater angles in the middle of the video. The error can be nullified by coupling two joints with identical angles to the intermediate shaft (cf. second video).