Luxafor makes a nice busy status indicator light for the office. Unfortunately it only provides software for Windows and Mac. But it’s not hard at all to get it working on Ubuntu with PyUSB.
Simple solution. Many posts online points to replacing fonts etc but with Eden, the included Arial has unicode support. You just had a shitty theme with custom non-unicode font. Just go to the skinning section of your theme (skins can change the hierarchy) and change the font from default to Arial. Easy!