Yay family

I've had a lovely day with my family. We had a huge argument, mainly about education but also about social mobility and prescriptive grammar and politics and all sorts over lunch. The we spent the afternoon watching Shrek, which is cute, and nicely animated, and does a reasonable job of defying expectations. I'd like it as froth apart from the fact that it utterly, horribly butchers Hallelujah. There are some bad covers I just can't forgive.

Then the first chanukah candle, interspersed with lots of silliness. I don't care very much about chanukah, but having the whole family together singing cheesy chanukah songs badly is lovely.

Technical notes

I've found out a couple of random things that may be useful to some others. Or else they may be either useless or completely obvious, but I'll share them just in case.

First up, a way of running Firefox on old computers that are short of memory (until I discovered this, Firefox was too crashy for me to use). fyre came up with a very useful fix for this. Since he describes it better than I can, see his Firefox memory issues post. Many thanks for that one. (Note: his site is semi-down at the moment, but still just about legible.)

Secondly, I have been tearing my hair out because I couldn't get Gmail's POP3 system to work; it kept giving me a weird error message about untrusted certificates in an SSL chain and suggesting I should add the appropriate site to a trusted list, something I don't know how to do. I assumed it was a temporary blip and trustingly waited for Google to fix it. Eventually I got fed up and went poking around, and it turns out the solution was to change the POP server details to pop.googlemail.com (rather than pop.gmail.com). This may be a localization thing, but it fixed a very annoying issue for me, at least.