MacDirectory Magazine

Riyahd Cassiem

MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.

Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1525170

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a fairly straightforward process, but when I went to set it up on my Android phone a while later, it was trying to walk me through the process of setting up the router as new, which I didn’t want to do at that point. I walked through the steps it showed onscreen, including skipping the parts that had already been done. After that, and after connecting it to the default WiFi network, I expected it to let me access the router, but it just sat there doing nothing, through several times going through the setup process. I ended up setting up GoodCloud, which was a login option on the mobile app, and I was then able to log in to and control the router. At first, I was frustrated about having to do this, not being able to just log in using the app, but since I’ve set up GoodCloud I’m now able to access the router from outside my home network, both in the mobile app and through a web page on any computer that has internet access, so it turned out to be a good thing after all. The interface has a few customization options, mostly light/classic/dark modes and 7 language options – English, Dutch, Español, Italiano, and 3 Asian languages (presumably Japanese, Chinese, and Korean). In Use I did test the 2.5 Gbps ports between two iMacs at work. They’re both set up with Thunderbolt docks that are capable of 2.5 Gbps speeds, so I wanted to test the difference in transfer speeds between them since I don’t have two devices capable of similar speeds at home. I transferred a 33.71 GB folder of media files from one iMac to the other. The transfer took just under 3 minutes. When I switched the networks to gigabit the same folder took almost 6 minutes. These iMacs have factory-installed SSDs, so disk speed was not a limiting factor here. Since I work with a lot of media, having a faster transfer speed is always welcome. I plugged an old USB hard drive into the USB port on the side of the Flint 2 to test remote file access. When you set this up you have to choose a folder to share. I had several folders, each with subfolders, on this drive. I just shared one of them for testing purposes. I enabled Samba (SMB) sharing and was easily able to access it through Finder on my Mac. I was able to transfer files to the drive from my laptop as well as viewing the files that were already on the drive. I could do the same from the phone app, including uploading images or videos from the Photos app or other files saved on the phone. This could be a convenient way to keep files accessible from anywhere, both at home and on the go, without paying for Dropbox, OneDrive, or similar services. I also plugged in a USB thumb drive that was formatted FAT32 and was able to view files on the drive but not transfer files to the drive from my computer. I had the same sharing settings for both drives so I’m not sure why that didn’t work. I have other thumb drives I might do some more testing with, but I’ll probably keep a regular hard drive (or even an SSD) set up for larger storage capacity anyway. In regular use the speed of the network, both wired and wireless, was as good as the existing routers I’ve been using, easily able to keep up with my current internet speed, even in the parts of my house that are furthest from the router, which is a nice upgrade from what I’ve had for the last couple years. I hope this holds up over time but so far so good. The main plugin I enabled was Adguard. I immediately noticed on some of the ad-supported sites that I frequent that most of the ads were missing. I understand and fully support the idea of ad-supported websites since that’s how most of the web is kept free for users (including this one), but some sites take it to the extreme and almost make their sites unusable, especially on mobile browsers. There is a settings page for Adguard that allows you to white- and black-list sites so you can only filter out the ads you really want to.

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