Happy weekend, and welcome back to 3-Ingredient Happy Hour, the weekly drink column featuring super simple yet delicious libations. This weekend I'm headed to the coast, and updating a classic, kitschy cocktail for the Pacific Northwest.

For kids, public ball pits are colourful pools of joy and wonder. For parents, they're disgusting germ incubators, a place where boogers, soggy Band-Aids and mouldy sandwich crumbs go to die.

Video: Seasoning cast iron with flaxseed oil isn't super new — Sheryl Canter first wrote about it on her blog seven years ago — but it has some serious fans. Both Cook's Illustrated and The Kitchn are believers, with the former saying it created "a sheer, stick-resistant veneer, that even a run through our commercial dishwasher with a squirt of degreaser left them totally unscathed".

My daughter has a toy dinosaur that talks to her. She named him Bob, and she can ask him anything: What's the circumference of Jupiter? Who won the World Series in 1965? What is the Hokey-Pokey really all about? But she's four, so she mostly asks him how to spell her name.

Choosing the right name for your baby is tougher than it sounds. You probably don't want an overly weird name lest your child gets teased at school. On the other hand, nobody wants to be saddled with a boringly common name like John or Chris (thanks for nothing, Mum!)

Instead, most parents plump for something that sits between unique and familiar. If you're stumped for ideas, this list of 100 popular baby names - 50 boys' and 50 girls' - is well worth a look.

When it comes to household chores, it's nearly impossible to remember what you started, who's supposed to be doing what, and what's still left to do. So you end up with a half-cleared out freezer, a vacuum that coughs out dust clumps ("Wasn't Bob supposed to empty this thing?!"), and a general feeling that everything is always awry.

When our very own US editor-in-chief sent me a recipe for ceviche, I was excited, because ceviche combines two of my favourite activities: Eating seafood and not cooking. When I read the recipe, however, I was a little appalled, for it suggested that beautiful pieces of fresh sea bass be left in an acidic marinade for two freaking hours.

There is about a tonne of plastic for each person living in the world today — that's 8300 million tonnes of plastic produced since 1950, most of which has become waste and ended up in landfills. Even worse, plastic production is increasing and half of all the plastic on Earth was created in the past 13 years. But you can reduce your own impact by cutting back your plastic consumption. Here are eight steps you could take.

Fast Food Face-Off is an occasional Lifehacker feature where we compare two seemingly identical takeaway products from rival stores to determine which offers the best value. Today: McDonald's Bacon & Egg McMuffin versus Hungry Jack's Bacon & Egg Muffin!

There's a lot of debate about when it's best to add salt to your scrambled eggs. If you're aiming for tender, melt-in-your-mouth eggs, it's best to do it before cooking.

Google's latest gadget is an always on, always listening little speaker called Home - and its officially available in Australia from today. It's a cute design, a friendly little blob of a thing that looks like a half finished cartoon character. Here are our first impressions.

People tend to have a lot of opinions on how you make a sandwich, but University of Miami football coach Mark Richt is the first person I've ever seen to draw a very specific diagram on how to eat one.

I recently asked you all how you keep your home in a liveable, not-too-messy state, and you responded with all sorts of great tips, most of which I plan to implement myself.

Family meal hacks are largely focused on efficiency. Cook in bulk. Freeze a month's worth of dishes at once. Buy a slow cooker.

You could buy the most expensive and nicest looking dress shirt at the store, but if it doesn't fit right it just looks wrong. This video shows you how to buy dress shirts that look great on you every time.

Earlier this month, a Scottish Twitter user known as "moth dad" went on a rant about America's lack of egg cups, conjuring up terrible images such eggs rolling around on plates, yolk spilling forth unchecked, and "solid f***ing eggs".

For picky-eating kids, there's one rule when it comes to food plating: You gotta keep 'em separated.

Most short rib recipes usually call for hours in the oven braising, but you can get super tasty and tender results by treating them like a steak: Season and throw them on the grill.

There's no doubt that if we're going to stop or even slow down climate change, we have to get our collective crap together. But collective action starts with individual choices, and for all the data-driven decision makers out there, the path forward just got a bit more lucid. A new study in Environmental Research Letters has determined exactly which life choices reduce our carbon footprints the most.