Reading Is Fundamental

This week the Wall Street Journal launched its own iPhone reader - for free! What do you get? The top 15 stories of the moment as well as editor's picks and some select videos. The setup is simple and clean. All articles are set up like columns, so doing a quick finger swipe left or right will move you to the next or previous piece, respectively. It may be the best iPhone news reader out there, especially for a newspaper with $100 subscriptions.

Twits

Thanks to Oprah, CNN and Ashton Kusher, Twitter has gone from a hip website to a mainstream hotspot. Unfortunately, many folks hopping on Twitter aren't used to social networking.

Here are a few quick do's and don'ts ripped straight from the headlines. We're still learning, so there will be more do's and don'ts in the future as we stumble through.

Save Some Cash, Get Unplugged

For Ben Veligdan, a music teacher in Brooklyn's Coney Island neighborhood, opening the electricity bill became a monthly surprise. There's no way more than $100 a month for him and a cat could be normal, right? So, Ben looked around his modest one-bedroom apartment for the culprit and decided unplugging his computer when sleeping or away at work would be a start. To his delight, the bill fell almost immediately.

R U a twit if you don't Twitter?

Eily Toyama gave in after friends pestered her to join Facebook. But she used her cat's name instead of her own so she could avoid networking requests from people she didn't really want to connect to. And don't even ask her about Twitter unless you want to get an eye roll.

"I just don't think people need to know that much about my life," says the 32-year-old Chicagoan, who works in information technology.

Call it online sociability fatigue. And it's not just being felt by older folks who have lived most of their lives without the Web. As social networking grows, from stream-of-consciousness Twitter to buttoned-up LinkedIn, even some of the very young people who've helped drive these sites' growth could use a break.

Are you all about Twitter? Take our poll after the jump ...

Cheap PlayStation 2 = recession-friendly fun

Fanboys rejoice! Sony dropped the PlayStation 2 price to $99, less than half the price of the Nintendo Wii, XBox 360 and its latest incarnation, the PlayStation 3. Yeah, the PS2 is old as hell, but the games are amazing. Besides, the fancy PlayStation 3 can play PS2 games, so when you decide to upgrade, the older games won't become obsolete.

Bad virus or April fools?

The (nerd) world has been up in arms about the Conficker worm, a PC virus set to be activated on April Fool's Day. Conficker quietly latches onto particular web sites and computer networks -- like the linked computers you have at work -- and, when activated, gets information from your PC. What kind of damage can it do? Theories range from stealing your passwords to taking over your computer entirely.

The Phone From Mother Earth

Hearing "eco-friendly technology" can bring up images of butt-ugly cars or underpowered computers. I mean, the sacrifice has to come from somewhere, right?

That said, the MOTO Renew is the first phone to actually worth considering. And, believe it or not, it is made out of 100% recycled materials.

MOTO Renew is definitely retro, reminiscent of earlier Motorola or Nokia phones, down to the basic screen and low-grade multimedia capabilities. (No fancy MP3 player on this one!) The green and black shell isn't exactly noteworthy, either. The positives? It has a nice, long battery life, giving nine hours active use - compared to as little as two hours on fancier phones - and the phone itself is created from recycled plastic bottles and other reused materials. And no, you can't tell.

The MOTO Renew is available now for a cheap $59.99. And better yet, T-Mobile is offering a limited-time $50 instant discount, making the phone a cool $9.99.

Plug-in Software That Fine Tunes iTunes

I generally like the way iTunes orchestrates my music collection, but sometimes it hits a wrong chord on the older and more eclectic CDs transferred to my computer.

That's why hundreds of songs in my iTunes library are missing the proper album artwork or have been lumped into loosely defined categories that don't truly describe the music genre.

For instance, the iTunes automated identification system believes that some songs by the B-52s, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Byrds all belong in the generic rock section. But these birds don't really flock together, do they?

How An iPod Can Be A Poor Man's iPhone

I try to keep a stiff upper lip about not having an iPhone. Just couldn't afford it -- not with the $75 a month or so AT&T charges for service on top of the $199 upfront cost for the device.

I could, however, afford the $229 iPod Touch, and got it as a gift, as it happened. It has most of the same goodies: a Web browser, e-mail, YouTube. And it stores way more music than the iPhone. (Ha!)

Plus, the other day I used it to call China.

Back Talk From Your New iPod Shuffle

Apple is ready to sell the new iPod Shuffle, and taking the "smaller is better" mantra to a whole new level.

The third-generation Shuffle, a super-slim rectangle (less than 2 inches long) takes up about half as much space as the previous version -- even as it doubles music storage space to 4 gigabytes.

The trade-off? To achieve such a tiny form, Apple had to remove most of the buttons from the body of the $79 device and build them into the headphone cord instead.