Use Your iPhone 5s Camera To Help With Troubleshooting

The iPhone 5s’ high-speed camera can be used to take pretty pictures — or to assist in troubleshooting if you’re having trouble reading a system alert.

Photo by Janitors

This tip was passed on by friend of Lifehacker Matthew J.C Powell, an Australian tech journalist of some note, who recently found himself helping out a friend with his server issues. As Matthew tells it:

I was helping a friend’s son get his Minecraft server working under Windows 8. Anyway, after eliminating most of the possibilities I figured that the local IP of his machine might have changed, which would of course bugger the port forwarding.

To check this I tried to run ipconfig from the command line. Problem was, every time I tried to open a terminal it would flash up on screen and disappear instantly. Why, I don’t know — and figuring it out would take far more patience than I have with Windows 8.

Solution: I used my iPhone 5s to shoot a video at 120fps, pointed it at the screen, then ran ipconfig. Even at that speed, the window was on screen for only a couple of frames, but I got the info I needed, fixed the port forward, and got the server running.

That’s a recipe for a classic tech lifehack in my book. I’m pretty confident that nobody in Cupertino had that in mind when they were building the 5s.

Thanks to Matthew for the tip!


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

Here are the cheapest plans available for Australia’s most popular NBN speed tier.

At Lifehacker, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


7 responses to “Use Your iPhone 5s Camera To Help With Troubleshooting”