Mac – way to power up a Mac Mini remotely

Is your Mac Mini Intel-based? If so, then it, along with your MacBook Pro, has gigabit ethernet. My suggestion would be to get some cat 5e or cat 6 cables and a gigabit switch. Still, I personally use Apple's "Screen Sharing" remote desktop client and server built into Mac OS X, and it works fine, and has acceptable performance even over wifi (or remotely through Mobile Me).

From this post:

Most modern computers offer a feature called "Wake on LAN". This is designed to allow a network administrator to turn on a computer remotely, even when it is turned off, by sending a "magic packet". This is used, for instance, to allow backup programs to run at night.

Here is a Python script that does this (if your MAC address is01-23-45-67-89-0a:

#!/usr/bin/env python 
import socket 
s=socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM) 
s.sendto('\xff'*6+'\x01\x23\x45\x67\x89\x0a'*16, ('192.168.1.255', 80))

Or you can use Wake550.

or use this site.