Mini 9 Hackint0sh

Shrinking System Preferences

Sun, 10 May 2009 14:24:00 +0100

The Mini 9’s short/odd screen resolution (1024x600) means that tall System Preferences panes (e.g. Spaces, above) won’t fit on screen, making some settings inaccessible. A solution is to set an option to ‘shrink’ the application window, in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.SystemPreferences AppleDisplayScaleFactor .75

In our ongoing mission to make everything ~~One-Click™~~ easier, here are two little apps that will change the scale factor and restart System Preferences automatically:

SysPref75 & SysPref100% 67kb

Launch one of the apps and it will: Quit System Preferences (if running) > apply Scale Factor > Restart System Preferences with the chosen scale factor. The scale factor setting persists until you relaunch one of the SysPref utilities. Keep these on your Dock or Desktop for easy access. [You might see some display artifacts/errors when windows are scaled, they will still function correctly]

Shrinking Other Applications

If you know the name of the preference file you can set the scale factor for individual applications with a Terminal command. For example, Google Earth has a minimum window height of 768px, you would need to shrink the window by 78% to make it fit the Mini 9’s 600px screen. Quit GE, run this command in Terminal and relaunch GE:

defaults write com.google.GoogleEarthPlus AppleDisplayScaleFactor .78

Shrinking Everything

MyDellMini forum user bmaltais posted an application called ‘Scale Resolution’ that sets the scale factor system-wide to either 80% or 100%. As this doesn’t scale application that are already open, you need to relaunch them — to make the Finder scale relaunch via Force Quit…

Feedback and questions in the comments, please.

Bluetooth

Sat, 09 May 2009 22:57:00 +0100

UPDATE

The forums have solved the missing on/off menu items, requires some terminal hacking (or there is a script available in the post) - interestingly after this modification, BTOff works!

BTOn & BTOff 86kb

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I found that the Bluetooth would sometimes turn off when pairing with mobile phones or waking from sleep. The odd thing is that the BT menubar icon doesn’t have the usual ‘Turn Bluetooth On’ option and the Preference Pane’s On option is greyed out, meaning you have to restart to get BT back.

The forums mention re-activating BT using Bluetooth Setup Assistant, but that takes a few clicks. Looking for a one-step solution, I found a command-line utility that can control (on, off, status) BT called blueutil. Taking that and wrapping it in an Applescript gives us a one-click solution: BTOn — leave it on your Dock or Desktop for easy access:

BTOn v1.0 43kb

* There’s a companion app for switching Bluetooth off, BTOff, but it doesn’t seem to work consistently on the Mini9 - feedback is appreciated.

Unboxing Photos

Wed, 06 May 2009 12:00:00 +0100