Note: I originally posted this over at Chai Life, but felt it deserved a place here as well.

Emoji Icons are a rather extensive set of icons (Emoji being the Japanese word for what we call emoticons or smilies) that are common in Japanese text messaging and web sites and are essentially have been standardized in Japan. They are available on the iPhone and are very fun to use, but it takes a bit of trickery to get them unlocked. Here’s a step-by-step on how to unlock them. Once unlocked, you can sent them in text messages, emails, or whatever else you can type on the phone and they will be viewable by anyone who has a phone or computer that supports them. Even other iPhone users, even if they haven’t done these unlocking steps themselves. So, without further ado, here’s how to unlock them:

1. Install the “Spell Number” app at the iTunes App Store. Don’t worry, it’s completely free.
2. Once installed, launch the app.
3. In the box, type this exactly: 91929394.59
4. As soon as you have that typed in, without doing anything else, press your ‘Home’ button.
5. From your home screen, go to Settings -> General -> Keyboards.
6. Choose International Keyboards, then scroll down to Japanese, click it, and turn on Emoji.
7. That’s it! You’re done! Thought it might be harder? Too bad. You can delete the app now, unless you feel you need it for other purposes. Whenever you’re typing, there will now be a little icon on the bottom left to switch back and forth between Emoji and English (or whatever other languages you use).

Here’s a small selection of the 461 emoji icons now available to you:

Any avid mac user is familiar with the capabilities of the Menu bar. There are some great built-in icons in that upper right hand corner of your screen, such as the clock, spotligh search, wireless, and volume control, but here are a few third party options that will take the utility of your menu bar to the next level.

iStat Menus
This is the grand-daddy of menu bar stat tools, offering a pull-down calendar, CPU usage, disk usage, memory usage, network activity, and more. For the short period of time that this was not yet compatible with Snow Leopard, I was completely lost.

Butler
Butler’s goal is to make every day common tasks that you perform on your Mac easier. It’s functionality extends far beyond simply the menu bar, but the menu bar features in particular can make just about every aspect of using your Mac easier and quicker.

Caffeine
Caffeine for your Mac serves the same purpose as it does for your body. It prevents you from falling asleep. This tiny program sits innocently in your menu bar until you activate it before doing any task in which you don’t want your Mac to fall asleep, such as watching a movie.

FeedAnimal
If you have a few RSS/Atom feeds that you like to keep tabs on, then this little menu bar icon is perfect. It displays the unread count next to the icon and can even broadcast new items to Growl.

Spirited Away
Hate clutter on your screen? Spirited Away gets rid of it. It’ll just innocently sit on your menu bar and check to see how long your applications have been idle. If an application is idle for a set amount of time, it will get hidden.

Camouflage
If, like me, you have a desktop cluttered with icons, then you might want to clear that up sometimes and remind yourself of what your wallpaper is. Camouflage temporarily hides all desktop icons to do just that.

Coconut Wifi
Mac OS X has it’s built in wifi icon, but Coconut Wifi offers what it doesn’t. It displays you a small bubble on the menu bar which indicates whether you’re in range of a wireless network or not and gives info if you click it.

Know other free menu bar applications that you think deserve a place on this list? Leave a comment and let us know!