The scenario:

1. I am bedridden from major leg surgery.
2. I am using my iMac as my entertainment center to keep me entertained while I’m stuck in bed.
3. Apple refuses to allow the user to manually turn off the screen without putting the iMac to sleep.
4. It seems that a USB device is causing my iMac to do a kernel panic when it goes to sleep, having to reboot it.
5. Pain triggers migranes and I must turn all light sources off.

So I needed to find a solution that would allow me to turn off the iMac’s screen ASAP without fumbling with a keyboard/mouse.

Well, so far that I know of there is no way to immediately turn off the iMac’s screen (*leers at Apple*), only within 1 Minute, which with a pounding migraine can seem like an eternity, but this is the best I’ve been able to figure out…

I found that Menu Master and Telekinesis provided a great solution to this and opens an unlimited possibility of remote control for my Mac.

Now, remember - I don’t want to put my iMac to sleep because it crashes forcing me to walk up to it and hold down the power button for 5 seconds, then turn it back on and login, so using the standard Sleep function already built into the Apple Remote is out of the question. (Plus I’ve been re-encoding videos overnight)

I had already created a couple of apple scripts to change my screen’s dim timeout via the menubar applescript icon, as so:

and

I then assigned a hotkey combination using Unsanity‘s MenuMaster, then, my friend The American Balloon showed me an app that he made called Telekinesis that totally reassigns the Apple Remote’s keys, I replicated most of the Apple Remote’s keys (or as close to it as I can manage) - except for the Play (Hold) (since I don’t want my iMac to sleep) and Menu (Hold), which I set to execute the hotkey combinations that trigger MenuMaster to execute my two apple scripts, the 1st to set the screen to sleep in 1 minute, and the 2nd to restore it to my default value of 15 minutes.

Unfortunately I don’t have much programming skills so I can’t get the computer to confirm the change - other than seeing the front app’s window blink (lose and regain focus). Unless of course if I had the Energy Saver Prefs open.

And this is just a very small example of what you can do with Telekinesis and Menu Master, you can also enable/disable Telekinesis so you can totally reassign all the keys and still be able to use it normally by selecting Disable from the menubar icon (or assign a hotkey).