Carobs are a girl’s best friend

You know you’ve got problems when you’re flicking through a jewellery catalogue and your eye homes in on the etymology tidbits rather than the diamonds. The tidbit in question comes from the Hamilton and Inches catalogue: The word “carat” when applied to gemstones is a unit of weight. It is a distortion of “carob”: the …

Get off your butt

I’ve just read a pretty scary article in The Independent newspaper which says that people who spend many hours of the day seated (at their desks or on the couch watching TV) are increasing their risks of ill health (and early death) — regardless of exercise at other times. This quote sums it up: The …

Converting PDFs (for free) without losing the formatting — or your temper.

I  took part in a conversation on Twitter recently about converting files from PDF to Word without losing the formatting. In this case, it was for translation purposes but there are plenty of other circumstances where this would come in handy. Filling in forms sent as PDFs, for example (so without having to print them out …