Setting Up a Headless Mac Mini without a Monitor

Last week I bought a refurbished Mac Mini to set up as the headless brain of my network. It’s main use is for shared disks and iTunes.

I only have laptops and no external monitors, so I needed a way to setup the Mini without a monitor. It was really easy, following these steps (this relies on Screen Sharing, so you need Leopard, but you could set up VNC or Apple Remote Desktop on and earlier version of Mac OS to do the same thing):

• connect a keyboard to the Mini
• start the Mini in FireWire Disk Mode
• connect the MacBook Pro to the Mini with FireWire cable
• restart the MBP using the Mini as the boot disk
• setup the Mini with network access and remote management (Sharing)
• reboot the MBP with its own disk
• disconnect the Mini and reboot

Voila! Now you should be able to use Screen Sharing over your network to remotely control your Mini-no keyboard or mouse required. However, If you want to turn off Blue Tooth, then you need to connect a mouse while turning it off.

New York Times Dictionary Popup

Today I double clicked a word in a New York Times article to select it. I wanted to use my Mac’s built-in dictionary to look the word up. But to my surprise, a window popped open from the site with a dictionary definition and a thesaurus entry below. I clicked around on a bunch of other words and they all did the same thing. Very slick. It doesn’t appear to work on the main page, just on actual articles.