Thanks for your advice.
I really believe it's a Good Thing(tm) to bring the icons (see, it's not unbelievable amounts of data) inside the script, because there are less things to go wrong.
Uuencoding might be an option. Is there a more "canonical" way to do it? I know, tmtowtdi, but I don't want people to look at my script and think "gee, what a moron". ;-)
-hacmac