Internet Things

Google Chromecast review

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A photo of a Google Chromecast

There were only a couple of presents that I specifically asked for Christmas this year, and one of these was a Google Chromecast. At £30, it’s a cheap and easy way of getting internet content onto your TV.

Roku versus Chromecast

If you’ve read my blog for a while, you’ll know that I’ve had a Roku 2 XS since summer 2014. I wanted a Chromecast to complement it, and alleviate some of the Roku’s shortcomings.

The Roku is good little device, especially as it now supports almost all streaming media services in the UK with the recent additions of Rakuten’s Wuaki.tv and Amazon Prime Instant Video. And it’s easy to use, since it comes with a remote control – unlike the Chromecast. The main issues I’ve been having are:

  • Speed – apps such as BBC iPlayer are very slow. You can press pause, and the Roku will take several seconds before it actually responds in any way. I imagine newer Roku devices (the third and fourth series) are much faster; the Roku 2 series was on its way out when I bought it in 2014. That being said, it’s still receiving software updates which is good.
  • Stability – sometimes the Roku crashes, and has to reboot. I’ve had particular problems with the YouTube app causing this.
  • Netflix – the Netflix app on the Roku (second series at least) is poor. It doesn’t support multiple user profiles per account, so whatever you watch goes on the viewing history of the main profile. And parental controls don’t work, so you can’t watch any shows on the Roku which require a parental control PIN.
  • Spotify – Roku has a Spotify app, but you need to be a Premium subscriber to use it – that means paying £10 per month. I’m on Spotify’s £5 per month ‘Unlimited’ plan, which suits me but doesn’t work with the Roku.

Where the Chromecast excels

Setting up the Chromecast is quite easy – it took around 10 minutes which included installing a software update. And installation is as simple as plugging it into a spare HDMI socket, and then connecting the USB cable to a spare socket (a mains adaptor is included if required).

To ‘cast’ something, you just need to open an app on your Android or iOS mobile device, and look for the cast icon. Whatever you’re streaming will then appear on your TV, and you use your device to control it – playing, pausing etc. And, it only casts the content that you’re streaming, so your TV won’t flash up any notifications for example. This is a big advantage over simple Bluetooth speaker systems, for example, which simply broadcast all of the sounds that your device makes.

Compared with the Roku 2, the Chromecast is very fast. Tapping the cast icon in an app registers almost straightaway on the Chromecast and the only delays seem to be caused by buffering, rather than the device itself being slow.

Netflix works as well as it would do on a mobile device, so we can watch more adult things when our one-year-old isn’t about, but also ensure that their profile doesn’t show them. And Spotify streaming via Chromecast is available to all users – even those with free accounts.

There’s also a guest mode, which lets anyone who doesn’t have your Wifi password to cast to your Chromecast – provided that they have the PIN code displayed on the home screen. The PIN changes at least once a day.

…and some pitfalls

I’ve already mentioned the lack of a remote. But this problem is exacerbated, in my view, because you have to go into the app to access the controls to play and pause. On iOS, at least, the controls don’t appear on your device’s lock screen. You can lock your device and the content will still play, but pausing when the phone rings (for example) is a bit more involved. It’d be nice if there was an iOS widget that could pause whatever is playing, but I don’t know if that’s possible.

Not all apps support Chromecast. The big one that’s missing is Amazon Prime Instant Video, although there is a relatively easy workaround. The other app that I miss is UKTV Play, which is the only way that we can watch shows on Dave, like the new series of Red Dwarf. Living in a valley prevents us from receiving Dave via Freeview, we can’t get Virgin Media, it’s not on Freesat and we’re too cheap to pay for Sky.

I was also hoping that my favourite Podcast app, Overcast, would work, but apparently not. A tweet from the developer suggests that it would not be trivial to add this in future. And you’ll need to use an app such as AllCast if you want to view photos and videos from Dropbox on your Chromecast. I had mixed results with this in my testing.

Also, none of the built-in apps on iOS support Chromecast. This isn’t surprising – Apple sells a rival device, the Apple TV, and has a rival protocol called AirPlay. AirPlay is, in my view, more basic than the Chromecast protocol. With AirPlay, your mobile device acts as an intermediary – it receives the content stream, decodes it, and then sends it via AirPlay to your Apple TV. The Chromecast, instead, streams directly from the content provider – your device merely sends some instructions. The main benefit is that it won’t drain your device’s battery.

Sadly, I also had some stability issues when using the NextUp Comedy app with the Chromecast. Like with the Roku, these caused the Chromecast to lock up and restart. However, at least my device remembered where it was, so I could pick it up again easily after a restart.

Putting Chrome into Chromecast

There’s a reason for the Chromecast having such a name, and that’s because you can cast web pages from the Google Chrome web browser on the desktop. This is how you can get the aforementioned Amazon Prime and UKTV Play onto your Chromecast, but it does mean that you’ll have to play and pause playback using your computer. Which isn’t ideal when your computer is in a different room to your TV, like it is in our house.

Overall

The Chromecast isn’t perfect and has some key pitfalls as mentioned. But it’s great value for £30, and relatively simple for a moderately tech-minded person to use.

Sending everything to Gmail

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A couple of weeks ago, I decided to consolidate all of my personal email accounts into my Gmail account.

Considering that my relationship with Google soured after they killed off Google Reader (yes, I’m still bitter, three years on), this may come as a surprise. Until recently, I only used Google services for my calendar, search, maps and the advertising on this blog. I’d even stopped using Gmail, and had all messages there forwarded to my Outlook.com account. Mail sent to this domain was managed by its own IMAP server.

I’ll explain why I changed my mind in a series of sub-headings.

Gmail’s better spam protection

On my own email server, I had SpamAssassin (albeit without the Bayesian learning system which isn’t set up by default on my host), Pyzor, and the use of Spamhaus‘ blocklists. This still wasn’t enough to prevent spam getting through, and at its worst I was still getting 10-15 messages a day in my inbox. Gmail’s spam filtering is much better, despite a few false positives. For example, an email from my mother was sent to the spam folder as it was about transferring money – I’m guessing Google struggles to tell the difference between my mum and someone purporting to be a Nigerian prince. But over the past couple of weeks, I think there’s only been one spam email that has got through.

Not having to look after my own email server

The email server software offered by my host, Dovecot, is fine, but I’ve had to do things like enable DomainKeys and SPF myself. Ditto for tuning SpamAssassin and installing Pyzor. Outsourcing my email to a third party makes it easier.

I had considered using Google Apps, or Office 365, on my domain, but ran into issues. With Google Apps, you can’t use an email address already associated with a Google account, so I didn’t take that forward, and got stuck trying to enable Office 365’s DNS settings. Whereas I was just able to set up a series of email forwards to send everything to Gmail.

Notifications for important email only

If you turn on Gmail’s Priority Inbox mode, it’ll attempt to sort your email into ‘Important’ and ‘Everything else’. Crucially, that means that Gmail’s mobile apps will only notify you about important messages (if you want), rather than every new email message that isn’t spam. This cuts down the number of distracting notifications on my phone.

One (powerful) inbox to rule them all

By forwarding the email to this domain and from my Outlook.com account (reversing the previous situation), I have all of my personal email in one place. And that one place has decent mobile apps and a powerful web-based interface. By default, my host offers SquirrelMail which is very basic; I have since replaced it with RoundCube but Gmail is still easier to use.

Access to third-party services

With Gmail, I can finally use services like Unroll.me to clean up my inbox (which I’ll eventually devote a separate blog post to), and IFTTT, to name a few. There’s also Inbox by Gmail, which I’ve been trying recently and it’s a very impressive improvement to the basic email inbox. Again, I’ll have to write about it in more detail sometime.

Although I don’t pay for Gmail just yet (and nowadays I’m loathed to rely on services that I’m not paying for), there is a paid-tier of Gmail offering more storage should I require it. However, as I don’t use Google Photos, I’m nowhere near the storage limit for my Google account and so I don’t need to pay for it at present.

For those of you wondering what email address to use, please continue to send messages to neil@neilturner.me.uk. This has been my primary email address for well over a decade and I plan to keep it that way. Whilst everything gets forwarded to Gmail, I will still reply to messages using that address, and should Google decide to change Gmail for the worse in future, I’ll be able to port it somewhere else.

Netgear WN3000RP Wi-Fi Range Extender review

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A photo of the Netgear WN3000RP Wifi Range Extender plugged into a wall socket

Today, I’m reviewing Netgear’s WN3000RP Wifi range extender (sponsored link) – a plug-in device to improve your home Wi-Fi network’s range.

You may be thinking, ‘wait a minute, you only reviewed a Netgear range extender a few weeks ago!‘. And you would be right. I was sent a Nighthawk EX7000 Wi-Fi range extender to review, but unfortunately I had to send it back to the PR company after I’d written the blog post.

I still needed a Wi-Fi range extender though, as my BT Home Hub 4 can’t reach the whole house. The WN3000RP model had some reasonable user reviews on Amazon, met my needs and was reasonably affordable, and so I put it on my Christmas list. Santa, or rather my Dad, obliged and so I’ve been using it since Christmas Day.

It’s a much smaller than the Nighthawk and simply plugs directly into a plug socket with no further assembly required. As it’s equipped with Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), configuring it is dead simple – turn it on, press the WPS button, press the WPS button on your router, and then wait a minute or two. A new Wi-Fi network will appear with ‘_EXT’ appended to it and it’ll use the same WPA security key (password) as your router.

That’s probably all most people will need to do, but a few configuration options are available using a web-based control panel. There’s also a port for a network cable to connect a device which lacks its own Wi-Fi connection, although you’ll need to provide your own cable.

The Nighthawk I reviewed in November was a premium model with lots of additional features, such as extra network ports, a USB port for a hard driver or printer and faster connections. This is a much simpler model without the bells and whistles, but it does the basic job well. It has certainly alleviated our wifi signal issues and seems to perform as well as we need it to.

If you’re looking for a simple solution to extend your Wi-Fi router’s reach, at £27 from Amazon, you can’t go wrong with the Netgear WN3000RP. It’s a fifth of the cost of the £140 Nighthawk EX7000 (although Amazon had it for £100 before Christmas) which offers extra features and performance, at a price.

Netgear Nighthawk EX7000 review

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A photo of the Netgear Nighthawk EX7000

Since we moved into our new house, we’ve had a few wifi issues, so I was pleased to be contacted by Netgear to review their Nighthawk EX7000 wifi range extender.

Our house was built over 100 years ago, with thick stone and brick walls. Whilst our router (a BT Home Hub 4) is in the centre of the house, the signal is very weak in places – especially the kitchen at the far end of the house. So a repeater, like this one, will allow us to extend the range of the Wi-Fi signal.

Setting up

In the box, there’s the extender itself, a stand (so that the router stands up vertically), three detachable aerials, an AC adaptor and a quick-start guide.

The Nighthawk EX7000 supports Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS). Fortunately, so does my router, so I just had to press a button on each device to configure the connection. Once set up, two new Wi-Fi networks appeared – a 2.4 GHz one, and a 5 GHz one – each following the same naming convention as my existing router. They even used the same Wi-Fi password.

Improved signal

Once I’d configured my iPhone to connect to the extender, rather than directly to the router, I found the signal much improved. At the extremities of the house, it dropped to two out of three bars, but this is significantly better than before where it’d lose connection altogether. It now means that everywhere in the house has a reasonable signal, which is a big improvement.

Extra features

The Nighthawk EX7000 isn’t just a Wi-Fi extender, however. On the back of the extender are five gigabit Ethernet sockets, so you can attach any devices without their own wireless connection using a cable. This will be great for my Raspberry Pi, for which I haven’t bought a wifi adaptor, but I’ve also plugged my Mac in as well. So far, the connection seems more stable than before although I’ve yet to play World of Warcraft on it – that will be its biggest test.

At the front, there’s a USB 3.0 port (type A). This can be used for sharing either a printer, or a USB storage device. As my printer is a multi-function device, I’ve kept it connected to my computer (although it is shared with Christine’s laptop using Bonjour anyway). Instead, I’ve plugged in a USB hard drive, and its contents are shared across the network using DLNA so that smart TVs and similar devices can access it.

FastLane

By default, the EX7000 uses both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands simultaneously, but you can enable ‘FastLane’ mode to increase speed. I turned this on, so that it uses a 5 GHz connection to the router but a 2.4 GHz to my connected devices. As only my iPad and iPhone support 5 GHz, I decided that it would be best to use 2.4 GHz.

All in all, the Netgear Nighthawk EX7000 is a very powerful device that fills several roles. It can extend your wireless signal, but it can also share a printer, files on an external device, and connect devices without a wireless capability of their own. This explains the £130 recommended retail price, as it’s a premium product, although Amazon sell it for around £100 at present. There are cheaper devices out there that can do one or two of these things, but if you want a powerful, fast Wi-Fi extender that combines several features in one box, then I can recommend the Nighthawk EX7000.

Update (January 2025): This model is no longer on sale.

The trouble with relying on free things

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Screenshot of the announcement that Sunrise is no longer in development

For some years now, I’ve been a user of Sunrise. It started off as a daily email with your events from Google Calendar and Facebook, but over time it evolved into a series of mobile and desktop apps, and a web site, where you could combine all of your various calendars together in one, intuitive interface. This meant that you could have events from Google, iCloud, and any Exchange server, all combined together with your Evernote reminders, gigs from Songkick, Eventbrite bookings, TripIt itineraries and more besides.

It was great, but at no point did Sunrise ever ask for money. Surely it must have cost money to run, and funding from venture capital only goes so far. So I wasn’t all that surprised when, earlier this year, Sunrise announced its acquisition by Microsoft. At the time, they promised to keep everything running, and for free.

At first, there were promising developments. Integration with Wunderlist, another recent Microsoft acquisition, a new keyboard for iOS and Android designed to help you plan meetings whilst in another app, and support for the Apple Watch are all additions made following Microsoft’s takeover. But then the Sunrise team dropped a bombshell this week: development of all of Sunrise’s apps has ceased.

Sunrise’s development team have joined the team working on Outlook for mobile devices. Mobile Outlook was also the result of an outside purchase by Microsoft, this time of Acompli. As you’d expect, the aim of the integration of the Sunrise developers is to improve Outlook’s calendaring capabilities, and, sure enough, a new version of Outlook for iOS was released this week. There’s a bit more background on the Microsoft Office blog, and an update for Android is due soon too.

As it stands, Outlook isn’t yet capable of doing all of the things that Sunrise can do, and so the Sunrise apps will still be available to download for a little while longer. But once Outlook has fully absorbed Sunrise’s features, I expect the apps will be withdrawn.

For me, this is a bit of a bummer. I used both Sunrise and Outlook on my iPhone and iPad; Sunrise to manage all of my calendars, and Outlook for my work email. I deliberately keep my work and personal email separate, and, crucially, don’t have notifications turned on for work messages. My job doesn’t require me to be reachable out of hours; therefore, whilst it’s useful to be able to use my phone to access work email whilst at work or in an emergency, I want to be able to completely ignore it away from work. But I do like to be able to see my work calendars outside of work, and get a holistic view of my diary across both personal and work calendars.

I won’t be able to do this once Sunrise has gone. If I make Outlook my primary calendar app, then it’ll have all of my work emails in there, whether I want to see them or not. Outlook on iOS, as it stands, is still an email client first and foremost; opening the app takes you to your email inbox by default.

So, reluctantly, I decided to take the nuclear option and delete Sunrise from my devices. Sure, it’ll carry on working for a while – probably. But it’ll disappear eventually and I don’t want to be hanging on to a product during its deathrattle.

For now, I’ve gone back to the built-in iOS calendar, which is okay, I guess. Part of the reason why I switched to Sunrise was its superior interface when compared to the stock iOS calendar in iOS 6 and below. More recent versions have been less ugly, but it’s still not got a great user experience even in iOS 9.1, in my opinion. I’m open to suggestions of alternatives – I may give Fantastical a shot, which is £3.99 on iPhone and £7.99 on iPad, both sold separately.

I suppose I shouldn’t have put so much faith in a free service which has no obvious income from users or advertisers. And I think that’s a good lesson in general – if you can’t work out the business model for something, it’s probably best not to rely on it.

Knowing how the cookie crumbles

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Screenshot of the privacy policy page

I’ve made two minor changes to the site today:

  1. There is now a privacy policy available to view
  2. The first time you visit this site from today, you will be asked for permission to store cookies on your computer

These come about because of my participation with Google AdSense – all EU sites must obtain user consent for cookies with effect from the end of September. This is the so-called ‘EU Cookie Directive’.

As you may guess from my tone, I’m not particularly happy about this. I accept the need for a privacy policy and I should have probably had one already, but I hate the popup cookie consent messages that sites use. There’s a lack of consistency, they offer a particularly poor user experience to mobile users (obstructing a large part of the page) and I bet almost nobody actually reads the privacy policies anyway.

The privacy policy is adapted from this example, and I’m using the Cookie Law Info WordPress plugin to generate the messages. The plugin is really simple and you can set it up in a few minutes. There’s no need to edit any templates, but you can still customise it.

P3P

I really wish that, following the EU Directive that mandated consent for cookies, that there had been some collaboration between web site owners and web browser vendors to come up with a more graceful solution. Whilst I accept that it’s best if users are able to consent to cookies being stored on individual web sites, this could have been done in a standardised way as a function of the user’s web browser.

Years ago, the W3C proposed P3P, which used HTTP headers and machine-readable privacy policies to allow users to select a level of privacy that they were comfortable with. Anything else, such as third-party cookies, would be blocked if desired. Ironically for a web standard, the only current web browser that supports P3P is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which has done since version 6. It remains an opt-in and rarely-used standard and the W3C paused all work on it ages ago.

I haven’t researched P3P enough to know whether it could be developed further, so that web sites can use it for EU Cookie Directive compliance. If it could, and if Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and others all agreed to implement it, then the web could become a less annoying place. Especially if there was an option to implicitly accept all cookies from all first-party web sites, for example.

SSL-secured

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A screenshot of Firefox showing that the connection to neilturner.me.uk is secured with a certificate.

One of my first projects after moving to the new server was to sort out a SSL certificate. Until now, any secure connections to this site have been using a ‘self-signed’ certificate which brings up big red warnings in most web browsers. Which is fine for me as I know I can ignore the warnings, but not ideal.

However, Google is (rightly) making HTTPS sites rank slightly higher in its results pages. So having a proper SSL certificate verified by a third-party is now more important, and not just because it offers better security to your users.

Two things were holding me back from getting a certificate in the past: the need to have an extra IP address, and the cost.

Extra IP address

Traditionally, if you want a SSL certificate for a particular domain, that domain would need to have its own, unique IP address. This was something that my host offered, but only by raising a support ticket and having it added manually. On the new BigV platform, I can easily add up to four IP addresses, allocate each to a domain name and set the reverse DNS. More IP addresses are available if needed, but on a request basis – after all, there aren’t many spare IPv4 addresses left.

Cost

I also had it in my head that SSL certificates were expensive – I was expecting at least £10 per month. As I’m saving £6 per month on my new hosting package, I decided to spend some of that saved money on an SSL certificate. Richy recommended Xilo to me via Twitter, and they offer SSL certificates for £16 per year – which is much cheaper than I expected. Xilo are a Comodo re-seller.

Setting up the certificate was really simple – it took me around 10 minutes, following Bytemark’s user manual. It’s been in place for a week now and works fine. I can’t get an Extended Validation (EV) certificate which shows the green bar in web browsers, as I’m not a company – individuals have to go for the more bog standard certificates.

Right now SSL is there as an option if you want to use it, but it isn’t the default. I may change my mind and make the site HTTPS-only, but this would require me to fix every link to every embedded image over 13 years of blog posts, and I’m not sure of the effect on my server’s load. That’s a project for another time.

Hello from the new server!

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A screenshot of the web site for Bytemark's BigV platform

I apologise for not posting anything for the past few days, but I’ve been waiting for the DNS on the domain to switch over to a new IP address. It should have happened on Saturday but it was actually the early hours of yesterday morning before it took effect, and in the meantime the new server was running an image taken from the old server on Saturday. So that the old server and new server were not out of sync, I decided to wait a little while – and besides, this week has been very busy for me at work.

So that’s the apology out of the way, now on to good things!

I’m still hosting my site with Bytemark, but I’ve moved to their new BigV platform. Mainly because they’re phasing out their older Virtual Machine platform but also because BigV offers more for less.

I was paying £15 per month (plus VAT) for the old virtual machine, which got me 500 MB RAM and 10 GB of storage on standard magnetic disks (plus 50 GB backup space). The new BigV virtual machine has double the RAM (1 GB) and 25 GB of storage on a solid state drive, although no extra backup space. But it’s only £10 per month plus VAT, so it’s a third cheaper. And because there’s more RAM and it’s running on solid state drives, it should be much faster.

Of course, I should really have left the upgrade until Monday, rather than doing it on a Saturday night when there was no-one at Bytemark to help me when it went wrong, but we’ve sorted the issues out now. And Bytemark did provide detailed instructions for moving across.

Next, I’m looking to install a proper SSL certificate on here. But for now, back to your erratically scheduled blogging.

De-Google-ifying, part II

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Screenshot of icons for Google services

Last year, in the fallout following Google’s announcement that it was killing off Reader, I decided to make an effort to reduce my dependency on Google services. The thinking behind it was essentially ‘if Google can kill off Reader, what else will they get rid of?’

Whilst I did delete all of the Google apps off my phone, barring YouTube, within a few weeks they were all back and I was basically back to where I was originally – reliant on many of the services Google offers for free.

But recently I have managed to cut back on my Google dependency.

Contacts – iCloud

I used to use Google Contacts to keep my address book in sync between my various devices – iPhone, Mac, and Windows desktop at work. Originally I used Thunderbird at work which had a couple of  unofficial extensions that synchronised the address book with Google, and my Mac and iPhone both natively supported contact sync.

And then we moved to Office 365, at which point Thunderbird just wasn’t up to the job. So I now use Outlook 2010 like everyone else, and there’s no easy way of linking Google Contacts. iCloud, on the other hand, works fine with Outlook and my Apple devices (obviously) so I successfully migrated a few months ago.

Mobile web browser – Safari

In April last year, when iOS 6 was the latest and greatest, Google Chrome was significantly better than Safari, in my opinion. However the improvements to Safari in iOS 7 and 8 have made them broadly equal in my view and so I’ve removed Google Chrome from my iPhone and iPad. Having just one web browser makes things a little easier to work with and third-party web browsers have always been second-class citizens on iOS. Plus, 1Password integrates with Safari through an app extension, which saves me having to open, close, copy and paste to retrieve passwords.

Two-factor authentication – Authy

Google Authenticator is probably the most well-known app for managing two-factor authentication codes, and indeed it was about the only one available for a long time. Now, there’s Authy, which has a few key advantages. Firstly it’s a universal app that can be installed on both iPhones and iPads, and secondly these can be kept in sync. So if I have my iPad to hand, I can use Authy on that to enter codes on my phone, rather than having to switch between apps. There are also a couple of web sites – namely Humble Bundle and Coinbase – which require Authy rather than Google Authenticator, and Authy can do everything that Google’s app can do anyway. So rather than have both, I’ve moved everything into Authy.

As for everything else, I’m still mostly using Google services. I don’t yet trust Apple Maps enough to use instead of Google Maps, even though it has improved since launch. My calendar is still in Google Calendar despite its woeful support in Outlook, because it allows Christine and I to view each others’ events. The results I get from searching with Google are better than Bing or Yahoo!. So whilst I don’t think I could ever completely give up Google, I’m pleased that I’ve been able to find better solutions elsewhere.

How I came to be on the ‘Chav’ page of Wikipedia

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Chavination II

The picture above is me. And, three years ago, this photo appeared in the Wikipedia article about ‘Chavs’. Here’s a link to the last revision – second photo down. I suppose I’d better explain why the photo came to be, and how it came to be on Wikipedia.

The photo

Chavination

The photo was one of several taken of me, by friends but on my camera, in March 2005 whilst at university. I must stress that, even at the time, this was not how I used to dress normally – this was a fancy dress party where the theme was ‘chavs’. It was in honour of a friend who had recently started teaching in a school in a Yorkshire town, which, at the time, was known for having a population of people you could describe as ‘chavs’ – ‘a young lower-class person who displays brash and loutish behaviour and wears real or imitation designer clothes’, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary.

The clothes were mostly bought cheaply from a charity shop especially for the occasion, and haven’t been worn since – I may have actually thrown them away in a previous house move. I’ve been informed that a real chav would not wear a Puma jacket.

After the event I uploaded the photo (and the one on the right) to Flickr.

So how did it end up on Wikipedia?

I had no part in this, but a Wikipedia user must have found the image,  uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons and then added it to the page. Which they would be within their rights to do – the image is licensed under Creative Commons with a license that is compatible with Wikipedia. So I’ve implicitly allowed this to happen.

Whilst the photo is not on that page anymore, and not linked from any other Wikipedia pages, at time of writing that photo is the second result for a Google Image Search for ‘chav’, so it has made it into several derivative works. A friend posted an image that was supposed to be ‘people from Castleford’ containing the photo – I’ve never been there apart from passing through on the train once or twice.

How do you feel about this?

Honestly? I’m generally non-plussed about it. It’s just something that happens on the internet, I suppose. As far as I’m aware nobody has turned it into a meme yet, at least.