Here at my loft, which we lovingly refer to as The Concrete Bunker, or just Bunker for short, I have a Mac Mini attached to our 46″ LCD TV via a DVI to HDMI cable.

The Mini does a fair amount of work for us, playing music during dinner parties, pulling movies off of the hackintosh in the music studio (which has a few terabytes of space on it), showing photos from the photo library, and giving us Internet access whenever we want from the big room.

The real problem is controlling this beast. A living room area offers different modalities of use than a laptop or computer desk. You want a keyboard, but you don’t have room for it. I want a mouse, but there’s no good place for mousing on the cushy velvet couches here.

Also, finding a 1/4″ mouse pointer on 46″ of space is a real pain. It’s like a small gnat on the big glowy window into the world. The mouse doesn’t move well either.

My solution right now is to use ARD (Apple Remote Desktop) on my laptop and the mini. My Macbook becomes my remote control for the TV, and once the movie is playing, I can fold up the laptop and stuff it down the side of the couch, or on the ottoman.

For the times that I need to use the mouse on the TV itself, I rely on two great tools.

To find the pointer, I use Mouse Locator. I configure this so that Control-Space activates a big green cross-hair where the mouse is.

Secondly, go into the control panel on the mini and enable selective zooming in Universal Access. This is counterintuitive! Set Zoom to off, click the Options… button, and enable “Use Scroll Wheel with modifier keys to zoom”. Set it on, and set it to the Control key.

Now, The Control key becomes your magic “Oh shit! Where am I ?” key.

If you need to see the screen, you can hold down control, spin the scroll wheel, and zoom into the point where the mouse pointer is. What a difference this makes in typing into small text boxes.