Turn off the Thunder, There's no Lightning: Saving Battery on the iPad mini

So I found myself with the iPad mini in hand, well on the way to leaving my laptop at home, or so I thought. My lightning cable unfortunately did not arrive thanks to that trusty government agency, the postal service. This is a most unfortunate incident for any nerd to be in possession of a new piece of hardware he has been dieing to try and no way to charge it. Fortunately the good people at Gazelle had the presence of mind to put some charge in the device before shipping it. It arrived with approximately 81% charge. Well I was then faced with the choice of how to use that 81%. I have opted not to leave my Josie (my MacBook) home just yet in order to make the 81% last as long as possible, hopefully long enough for the P.O. to perform their all important service.

But of course I don't want the lightning cable to arrive and me still have 80% charge on the mini, I want to do things with it. So I have used all the battery saving tricks I know to get the mini to last as long as possible so that I can use it, but not to heavily. Here's what I did, most people already probably know these tricks, but they might help some of you out.

• Turn off the volume, sound requires power and that comes from the battery, so if you don't need to hear it, turn it off.
• Turn down the brightness, the screen is the big juice hog and the brighter it is the more it will use.
• Turn on Airplane mode, if you can do your work without using the mini's radios all the better, they use battery to send out those signals.
• If you have to have WiFi on, turn off location services, nobody needs to know you are eating at Jimmy John's while you are in a battery crisis.
• Turn off bluetooth, even if you need the WiFi on you probably aren't using bluetooth, so make sure it is off.
• Turn off push notifications for any apps you don't need, if they have to be checking the internet in the background all the time that's going to suck battery.

And that's it folks, my iPad mini is currently at 54% after 5 days of some use each day, hopefully we can make it until the lightning strikes.