I’m hoping to use my Verizon MiFi to get my iPad online come April 3rd, and I know that some of my online peeps are planning to do the same.

(For those unfamiliar with the MiFi, it obtains a data connection from your cellular provider and becomes a portable battery-powered WiFi base station for up to 5 wireless clients. It’s also available on Sprint, and is known generically worldwide as the Novatel 2200. The device is free with contract or about $200-300 without. Service is about $60/mo after tax for up to 5 GB, or you can get a 24-hour “daypass” for $15 each.)

To see what it might be like to use it with an iPad, I did a little field test today with the MiFi and my iPhone.

By itself, the battery in the MiFi would last (and this is my wholly unscientific guess) about 4 real-world hours on constant standby, and maybe 2 hours with continuous active use. So I decided to pair it with an external battery.

I happened to already have a Powermonkey eXplorer and its matching Micro USB tip (sold separately).

I should note two changes I made to the MiFi config:

1. By default, the MiFi will disconnect after a few minutes of inactivity. This makes for a huge improvement in battery life, but becomes a mild nuisance because you must press the button on the MiFi to reconnect it before each use. I changed the power saving options to never disconnect so that the WiFi network would always be available.

2. Again by default, the MiFi seems to get a bit confused when you plug something into its USB port (like a charger) and thinks it’s connected to a computer, so it stops broadcasting its WiFi network and tries to bridge the connection over USB. Fortunately this is easy to fix, and you’ll want to do so before using an external battery.

So, I charged up the MiFi and the Powermonkey, put the iPhone on the MiFi’s network, and headed out for the day.

I used the iPhone lightly throughout the day, and it did its usual background email checks, and so on.

So how did it do? The external battery drained out first, keeping the MiFi topped up. I’m not sure exactly when, but it was dead when I checked it at the 9 hour mark. The MiFi however still had 3 of 4 bars of battery life.

It’s now at about the 12 hour mark, and the MiFi is showing one bar of battery left. Quite a respectable showing overall.

My conclusion is this should be quite an effective way of getting a non-3G iPad online for most of a day, at the cost of a little extra bulk that can easily stashed in a bag. (It does get a little warm, though.)

The external battery might not even strictly be necessary if you were willing to live with the extra button push after inactivity timeout.

The added bonus of using an iPad + MiFi vs. an iPad + AT&T 3G is you can use the MiFi with any other WiFi compatible device, like your MacBook, when you’re in some hotel with horrible, expensive WiFi. Or any other place with poor AT&T connectivity.

“And I think it turned out that the Playstation 3 leap day bug was caused by the same clock chip that was used in the Zune — the one that broke every Zune in the world for 24 hours a while back.”

“What’s a Zune?”

I am one of those Dock-on-the-right weirdos and I hate that my desktop icons gradually drift out of alignment around the screen all day due to the changing size of the Dock. So I spent 30 seconds making cleanupd

Download it, customize the timeout if you like. Do a release build (or use the pre-compiled binary in builds). Copy it into /usr/local/bin. Run it backgrounded from the terminal: /usr/local/bin/cleanupd &

Hey presto, automatic desktop snap-to-grid clean up every so often, using whatever grid the Finder happens to be using this second.

Uh, enjoy?

My brother-in-law Dan is getting 2010 off to a positive start by running a charity marathon to benefit leukemia and lymphoma research. He had a tragic 2009 where he lost not one but five loved ones to various diseases. If you can afford to donate to his cause, it would be most welcome.

A homebrew app for the Palm Pre reboots your phone according to a schedule.

This is such a perfectly encapsulated nutshell of exactly why Apple does not allow third-party background processes on the iPhone.

On the other hand, a Pre can play music from Pandora in the background while you do something else.

This gets right to the very heart of the old world / new world schism.

Microsoft has done at least two things right with Windows Mobile 7.

First: Recognized that they needed to start over.

Second: Not ripping off Apple’s UI style as every other vendor has been content to do.

Whether the new UI holds up in real world usage remains to be seen. As does whether Microsoft’s traditionally change-resistant customer culture will embrace it.

But if nothing else, kudos for having the huevos to try something new and unique.

I forked the excellent (open source!) Notational Velocity app, and hacked in a third pane that shows you the note you’re viewing as rendered by Markdown.

My fork can be found here.

I would like to also eventually add W2 style note-linking syntax. Then NV + Simplenote will be a rather capable replacement for W2.