Sometimes the emoji keyboard on your smartphone doesn’t have exactly what you’re looking for.

Back in the days of MSN Messenger, (Y) was a coding shortcut for the "thumbs up" emoticon. Many people continue to use this symbol to convey approval or affirmation - even in chat clients that don't support the code. This practice must be stopped. With firearms if necessary.

Emojis are part of our general vocabulary these days, but they're not as easy to get to on your desktop like they are on your phone. That said, you can bring them there, thanks to a feature in Canary, Google's developmental version of Chrome.

Windows/Mac: I casually mentioned the existence of Emojicopy the other day in one of our secret Lifehacker chat rooms, and I was surprised to find that nobody else had ever heard of this site. Which then got me thinking: How do most people hunt down emoji to drop into messages, blog posts and other important documents?

Apple is set to add even more emoji to iOS with its latest update. That means more options to choose from (including new food such as dumplings and pie), but it also means you'll have to scroll past even more emoji to find the one you actually want.

iOS: Apple just released iOS 11 last month, but for emoji fans, the really important update is still on the way. iOS 11.1 will add hundreds of new emoji, and the public beta is coming next week. Here's what you need to know about the update and how to get it as soon as possible.

I used to think I could get rich off domain flipping. Casino.com sold for $US5.5 million ($7 million) in 2003, and PrivateJet.com sold for $US30.18 million ($38.5 million) in 2012. I've since given up on the concept, opting to spend my time purchasing domains for inside jokes rather than retirement plan gambles. While I'm pretty sure you won't get as lucky as Sex.com (a cool $US13 million ) you can still score a pretty cool one thanks to ?.to, a site created by BetaList founder Marc Köhlbrugge offering an easy way to purchase emoji-based domain names, and see which ones have been snatched up.

I recently purchased a few smart bulbs and have plans to expand my collection of smart lights. I did notice a small inconvenience during setup, however: It was hard to tell which bulb was which without staring into an app. So I added a visual aid to my bulbs using emoji stickers. It's a lot easier to see the "banana" light is out instead of trying to figure out which bulb is "Hue living room bulb 7" while your ceiling fan is off.

Fans of Bitmoji: there's a new caricature app that you'll want to see. It's more aesthetically pleasing and a breeze to use, but not so simple to share.

We've seen a few different ways to add Slack-style emoji search to your Mac, but Rocket's probably the simplest way to do it.

Android: We've all grown pretty accustomed to how handy predictive text can be, but if emoji is your preferred mode of communication, Swiftmoji, a new keyboard from SwiftKey, is going to be more your speed.

Searching for and using Emoji on a Mac is a bit frustrating, so over on GitHub, user warpling shares their set of substitutions that makes it easier to place emoji anywhere you need them.

Not sure how exactly you want to express yourself in emoji? Emoj is a simple little command line tool that allows to crank out a sentence and easily search for emoji that fit the bill.

Mac: The newest version of Alfred introduced improved text expansion. The cool thing is you can easily download packs from other people to implement them in Alfred. Joel Califa created a series of auto expansion rules and searches that makes finding and adding emoji a ton easier.

Every brand has to have its own take on each emoji nowadays, and that differentiation might be hindering communication. It turns out emoji can mean different things to different people, according to a recent paper.

If you're a casual Facebook user, you might be wondering what the deal is with all those weird emoji things that are suddenly appearing below your posts. These are Facebook's new reaction buttons for statuses that require more than a simple "like". We explain what they do and how to get them.

Ever felt there was an emotion that you could only express in the form of a taco? The folks behind Unicode apparently have.