APP SMART; A Review of Ringer, Ringdroid, Ringtone Maker and Ringtone Studio
Not long ago, a ring tone was the only thing that people bothered to buy for their phone, and some users spent big money on their collections of jangly alerts. Now you can download one app for roughly the same price of one of those old ring tones, and turn your favorite songs into sweet-sounding tones. With a little work, or, for Apple users, more

Refugees From Syria on Edge in Lebanon
TRIPOLI, LEBANON — The crackling of automatic gunfire coming from the speakers of 15-year-old Ahmed’s laptop breaks the quiet in a sunlit wing of a private hospital on the outskirts of Tripoli, one of Lebanon’s two largest cities. He calmly concentrates on the screen as he reruns a video of the day last year he was shot at an

OP-ED COLUMNIST; Anthony Shadid’s Story
LONDON — I knew him through the time of the revolution, seated — perched really — at a round table in the Cairo bureau of The New York Times. He was never alone. He had no office. The old three-legged wooden table was not a desk. The pressure over the 18 days leading to Hosni Mubarak’s fall never relented. Nor did his

Accessories Make E-Readers Easier to Use
E-readers are functional right out of the box. But when consumers start using them, many find that they are craning their necks awkwardly, constantly wiping the screen with their sleeves, or holding some readers to the light at night while straining to read others in the sun. Help is at hand. The marketplace for e-reader and tablet accessories is

GADGETWISE; Tip of The Week
The yellow folder icons sitting out on the Windows 7 desktop usually offer a micro-thumbnail peek of some of the files inside the folder. If you would prefer to give your desktop folders a more distinctive look so you can find certain ones more easily, you can choose a specific picture to peep out of each folder instead. To change the folder's

Extreme Users Consume Oversize Chunk of Bandwidth, Study Shows
BERLIN -- As the U.S. presidential election season unfolds, some consumers may be surprised to learn that disparities like the concentration of wealth in the top 1 percent of American households also apply to another domain: the consumption of wireless data. According to a British research firm, the world's congested mobile airwaves are being