There are two kinds of black foods: Those that admit they are full of charcoal, as if that's a thing you are supposed to want, and those that don't. (There is a third category, foods made with other ingredients such as black sesame, but this is rarer.)

A few weeks ago, the Commonwealth Bank updated the onscreen menu for its Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs). Presumably, the redesigned interface was implemented in an attempt to make customers' lives easier (and perhaps to garner some good will after that recent ATM money-laundering scandal.)

Unfortunately, the results are a bit of a dog's breakfast. Here's why.

Hello, and welcome back to What's Cooking?, the open thread where you get to share your brilliant thoughts, advice, recipes and opinions on all things food-related. This week I'd like to talk about packed lunches, and how you keep them tasty and interesting.

The latest instalment of Netflix's series of New York based superhero stories, The Defenders, was released over the weekend. It brings together Matt Murdoch (Daredevil), Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Danny Rand (Iron Fist) to battle The Hand for the survival of their city. The series is a great improvement over the last two Marvel/Netflix instalments, Luke Cage and Iron Fist, and goes close to living up to the hype. Here's my spoiler free review.

You probably think you know how to keep your internet habits secret. "Clearing browser history is too obvious," you say. "I just do all my sketchy stuff in an incognito window!" OK, hot stuff, then let me ask you this: You ever search anything weird on Instagram? Got any visits to an ex's Twitter profile that you might not want to share with the next friend or loved one who grabs your phone? "I've gotta show you this adorable Japanese puppy's account... Why do your recent searches look like Armie Hammer's?"

After being made available to developers back in March, and then more broadly through a public beta in May, the eighth major release of the Android operating system finally arrives today with Google revealing that the mysterious "O" actually stands for Oreo: A sandwich cookie suffering from a terrible identity crisis over the past few years.

In case you haven't noticed, much of the world has spent the day gleefully reveling in full-blown Eclipse Madness. But now that the blessed event is behind us, it's time to reflect. Here are some of the best photos and occurances from this once-in-a-century event.

According to Australia’s Biggest Smartphone Survey we spend three hours a day on our phones, on average, with almost one in five of us admitting we check our phone at least once every 15 minutes. If you're anything like me, leaving home without your phone, or going somewhere with little or no mobile coverage, is enough to make you feel pretty unsettled. So, are you a slave to your smartphone?

"Okay, Google. Find me the best price for Google Home."

Google Home, the voice-controlled smart speaker/personal assistant/smart hub for your home, usually retails at $199. Right now, you can get it for $134.90 from DWIdigitalcameras.

From snapping photos with a mobile phone to streaming music through a browser, much of the tech trickery we take for granted in 2017 looks simple on the surface but involves a complex series of computations and calculations behind the scenes to make the magic happen. As an example, take Google.com.

Speech recognition systems are assessed using a standard test called Switchboard - a collection of recorded telephone conversations. Microsoft has achieved a 5.1 human parity word error rate rate on this test using new machine learning techniques, putting their software on par with human transcribers who are concentrating hard on recognising and translating audio.

I'm calling it — this is the most important episode of the season thus far. Find out why!

I used to get in debates almost every time I drank whiskey on whether or not it was appropriate to add water to the stuff. A few aficionado friends would always argue that the only way to drink whiskey was straight up, and I was ruining it with a few drops of H2O. I'd argue most whiskeys were a bit better with a few cubes of ice or a tiny bit of water. The fact of the matter is you should enjoy it however you prefer it, but now there's actual science to back up my watery claims.

A next revolution in warfare where killer robots, or autonomous weapons systems, are common in battlefields is about to start. Both scientists and industry are worried.

Brief news items of note for Lifehacker readers, including: Hands on with the Essential smartphone, millennials are killing countless industries, scary Silence Of The Lambs toy is too realistic.

I'm cool with Peppa Pig. Peppa is a charmingly imperfect pig-child, and Daddy Pig, despite falling into the cliché befuddled father type, makes me giggle. And who can resist George's one-track obsession with Mr Dinosaur? I don't protest much when my four-year-old daughter asks to watch the British preschool cartoon, and the quickest way for me to find a string of episodes is to grab the iPad and type in "Peppa Pig" on YouTube.

Virtual private networks (VPNs) have many legitimate purposes. They're also used to cheekily circumvent geo-blocks on overseas sites like US Netflix - often against the express wishes of rights holders. Like most online technologies, government legislation is currently a bit vague on what is and isn't allowed. So is it legal to stream restricted content through a VPN? Let's find out.

The pet adoption process for my family was ... unexpected. One Saturday, when my six-year-old son was having a play date in our backyard with his cousin and his best preschool friend, a black cat came to visit. To them, the cat visit was more exciting than the waterslide and the popsicles I had brought out. They squealed, pet him, and followed him around.

He started coming by more often, walking with my son and his grandmother to school and hanging around near our patio door. My husband started putting out food and water. My son named him Sammy. Everyone started calling Sammy our cat. I, on the other hand, was extremely hesitant to keep him — we had never had a pet, and I just knew all the dirty work would be left with me.

There are thousands of choices when it comes to cases for protecting your smartphone. As an avid trail runner I need to safely carry my phone just in case I get into trouble. I've been testing the Bodyguardz Trainr Pro case and arm-band combo for a couple of weeks. Here's what I think.