So, I wrote about my fledgling media center set up before, and I ranted about the AppleTV saying I would just get a Mac Mini and call it a day.

Well that day has been called. I picked up a low end mini this week, and set it up last night. When I fired up the mini, things went bad. Real bad. It seems that the mini wanted my LCD HDTV to run at an altogether silly resolution, interlaced no less, and my TV said.. "uh, no".

The Problem

So I was stuck with a TV that said "Invalid Mode" and no second monitor to hook to the mini to reset the resolution to something more manageable. What to do? Well the first thing was obviously to break out the powerbook and ask the great oracle of goog what to do. There were many answers offered up by the all seeing goog, but none worked for me. It was time for a less conventional approach.

The Solution

It occurred to me that navigating around the Mac-OS was pretty easy with the wealth of keyboard commands at my disposal. If I could just settle upon the correct sequence I could reset the resolution on the mini, without actually seeing anything. I had my handy lappy right there, so why not give it a shot. What I came up with is a fool proof way to reset the resolution without having to reboot the machine, or actually see the UI. Here's what I did:

1. Do yourself a favor and hit enter. Depending on the circumstances, there might be a dialog that says your resolution is out of range of the attached monitor.
2. Next hit apple + spacebar. This will call up Spotlight and give focus to the search area.
3. Type in displays, wait 5 seconds and then hit the down arrow key once. This will highlight the search result you want. Hit enter.
4. Wait about 5 seconds, and then hit tab. When the displays pref pane loads the search box will have focus, hitting tab will move focus to the resolutions list.
5. Now hit the up arrow and wait for around 5 seconds. Keep doing this until you hit a resolution that your monitor/tv can handle.

That's all there is to it. Within 5 minutes I had a working resolution, and I was setting up the mini as my media-center. I hope this will help other people who might run into a similar problem.