I've mentioned how bad the cheap monitor on my Mac mini is/was. Early last week, in a fit of 'Spring cleaning itis", I decided to simply remove the monitor and put myself out of the misery! It was also taking up so much vertical space, it was blocking the 12 slot 'storage' case where I stash papers that are too important to trash... for at least a couple of years, anyway.
I'd already been using Screen Sharing for months, so that would/should suffice for the rare moments when I needed to actually enter some data or click a button. That meant I could also remove the keyboard and make more room for another stack of papers that I eventually stick into the 12 slot, mostly IN box! ;)
Things were fine until yesterday when I finally noticed that the Menu Bar was almost completely black! :o I knew I had been using "Dark" mode, but changing that didn't help. None of the other Accessibility settings did much of anything (clue #1). Decided I may have been asking too much from the Display Color settings, but I was getting no visible response from any of the controls (clue #2).
I finally decided an interweb search was my only the only solution. Of course, search results are highly dependent on how the search is worded! I found thousands of hits explaining how to enable/use/set Yosemite's "Dark" mode. Thanks, but that's not the problem, folks... But my perseverance (many call in my hard-headed, mule-like stubbornness :P) paid off when I found a thread entitled exactly what I had searched for! How can I get rid of a black menu bar? (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6620453?start=0&tstart=0) There were actually two ways to 'fix' the problem. One is a command to paste into Terminal (or into the Terminal access box in PathFinder). The other is a hardware, and supposedly permanent one, it even comes in two varieties!
The problem is that without a monitor connected to the mini (and some even report the same problem with the Mac Pro!), the GPU gets 'confused' as to what to show and how. Images, windows, text, icons, most other stuff, no problem. "Menu Bar"? That sounds like some kind of candy! What does that have to do with computers, besides, Windows has the Menu bar in every window, right? [banghead] The fix is to 'trick' the GPU into thinking there is a 'virtual' monitor connected. ;D
The Terminal 'fix' is subject to being erased by a loss of power shutdown or other un-controlable memory happenings. The kind of "memory happenings" from which I seem to be experiencing more and more. :rolleyes:
The hardware solution has proven so successful that there is now an OS agnostic, relatively cheap, manufactured, extremely niche product available at Amazon!! For those with more time than aesthetics, there is the:
(http://i1327.photobucket.com/albums/u666/xAirbusDriver/DiY_zpsjhnwpnf6.jpg)
D-I-Y method (http://blog.macminicolo.net/post/33839671756/build-a-dummy-dongle-for-a-headless-mac-mini)
...or the "fit" method at
(http://i1327.photobucket.com/albums/u666/xAirbusDriver/fit_zpsudzr6isg.jpg)
Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FLZXGJ6/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00FLZXGJ6&linkCode=as2&tag=bgsco-20)!
Hope this helps people from losing their patience when losing the head on their mini! :)