So I’ve had my Mac Pro hooked up to my Sharp LC-47SB57UT 47” LCD and have loved it since the first volts of current passed through its wires to turn both it and me on. But there was always something that bothered me, the black border around the desktop that isn’t quite filling up the entire screen!

Sure I’ve overlooked it this far, but I think its come time to tackle this problem once and for all. I’ve tried a couple different applications out there for the Mac OSX that helps resolve issues of scaling the resolution correctly to fit your flatscreen pixel to pixel, but have found that SwitchResX is the best out of them all, considering it has a lot of fluid options to control both the entire desktop when loading at startup as well as individual applications when launched.

For many of you that have experienced this problem with your Mac’s, you know that it can be a very aggravating experience to fix the timing and resolution settings to be in perfect sync for your monitor to recognize correctly. I had a Powerbook G4 that was quite often hooked up to my Sharp Aquos model LCD that with a few hours of tinkering with SwitchResX, was able to get it going — with the help of Sharps menu within the its control panel to “fit” and “scale” the picture to be either “dot by dot” or “letterbox”, etc. etc.

With the Sharp (non-Aquos) LC-47SB57UT model I have, it lacks that same menu to choose a “dot by dot” setting which makes things much more difficult because usually, that along with checking “Overscan” within the System Preferences > Display > Options pane does the trick. Not so this time around!

So in I dove with SwitchResX and reading all the tutorials, posts, and blogs out there about others frustrations with getting their custom resolution settings correct. Im just going to come out and say it, I need help! To those who know their way around SwitchResX and timing definitions I would be most appreciative if you could send a little help my way. The following is my EDID info for my Sharp LC-47SB57UT I have:

(Download the full EDID here)

Monitor Description blocks:

—————————

Descriptor #0 – Timing definition:

Mode = 1920 x 1080 @ 60.000Hz

Pixel Clock…………. 148.50 MHz            Non-Interlaced

	Horizontal	Vertical
Active………………	1920 pixels	1080 lines
Front Porch………….	88 pixels	5 lines
Sync Width…………..	44 pixels	36 lines
Back Porch…………..	148 pixels	36 lines
Blanking…………….	280 pixels	45 lines
Total……………….	2200 pixels	1125 lines
Scan Rate……………	67.500 kHz	60.000 Hz
Image Size…………..	1039 mm	584 mm
Border………………	0 pixels	0 lines

Sync: Digital separate with

* Positive vertical polarity

* Positive horizontal polarity

My Display Settings when going to System Preferences are as follows:

And finally, when I open SwitchResX and add a Custom Resolution setting, the defaulted settings that are currently in use are pre-loaded as seen below:

But after days, and now weeks of trying to tinker with the right timing settings and (probably) doing incorrect math to make sure I don’t blank out my monitor, I cant avoid the fact that I need help. So if you’ve read this and can understand my frustrations send me a little help in the comments. Or tweet me, Im going to solve this one way or another but I really don’t see why I should go it alone. Any and all help is GREATLY appreciated and will be properly honored.

UPDATE: In case you also, have a similar problem like myself I found SwitchResX’s User Guide floating around online, its not the current version but it may help some of you grasp the concept of how/why SwitchResX works, as well as some tips on what to do in certain situations.

SwitchResX User Guide

UPDATE: It appears this app is no longer in the App Store. Reviewing the twitter feed shows that the app was submitted for review but perhaps never got approved. The only other app that might work for this would be the Boxcar app with the Uptime Robot turned on. However, for the amount of detail like instant notification of a particular “part” of a website being changed, has yet to be found. Although, if you live in Japan, iOS 5 has the option to give you Push Notifications for their Earthquake Early Warning System in place. (Which, can cause massive tsunami’s in certain areas)

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So one of the other iPhone app gems that I think doesn’t get enough publicity is the LetMeKnow app. (@pushnotifyme on Twitter)

This app is a real time saver and can come in real handy if you want to receive notifications of (almost) anything online. One great example to make use of it would be to configure it to watch NOAA’s Tsunami Watch website for any warnings you will need to know about. (@usoceangov on Twitter) First head over to the App Store and get this free app (as of this posting) by clicking here.

Once installed and opened, tap on the “Catalog” tab on the bottom. Next, tap the “Webpage” icon, and in the URL put in the correct NOAA Tsunami watch webpage for your region.

For West Coast & Alaska: http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/

For Hawaii: http://www.scd.state.hi.us/

After inputting the site, make sure the following settings look like the snapshot above. “Look At” should be set to the “Part of Page”, and Sensitivity set to “At Least 1% Different”. For the Part of Page setting make sure you tap the area in which you want to continually “watch”. So for this example we will want to watch the banner that would change if there is a Tsunami warning. Tapping in that area will “highlight” it and your ready to go back to the Edit Subscription menu and tape “Save”. Example below:

(Side note: if you tap an area that LetMeKnow gives you an error from like a dynamic item on the page, simply select a larger region of that site to encapsulate the content you want to watch. I needed to do this and the snapshot above represents the area I needed to highlight in order for the app to recognize the item.)

After a few minutes from saving it, your LetMeKnow app will be ready to notify you the moment NOAA gives any sort of warning on its website! Let’s hope we never get any notifications from NOAA by using this app because we’ll know what that means, but if so at least you’ll be one of the first to know to get to higher ground.

There are plenty of other uses for this app, but I think this by far represents one of the coolest uses for it. At least, until the NOAA puts out an official iPhone app that does Push notifications for Tsunami and weather alerts.