Ultra Orthodox Hasidic newspaper Der Tzitung is telling its readers like it isn’t- by editing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from the now-iconic Bin Laden raid Situation Room photo. Oy vey. More

Sony is performing the old salt-in-the-wound trick by informing Bloomberg that the PSN/Quoricity outage should last another 22 days with an expected return date of May 31. This came from an interview with a Sony spokesman in a Bloomberg interview. Security is the key here. Sony is adopting new techniques and practices to beef up its online services and apparently that takes some time.

Luckily online gaming was never a core tenet of the Playstation Network or people would be really upset. In related news, co-op mode on Portal 2 is really cool.

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The PSN Outage Should Last Until May 31st

The percentage of households in the United States that have TVs dropped from 98.9% to 96.7%. Why would you think that happened? Where I live, high-speed internet access costs $40 a month, whereas a decent slate of TV channels on cable costs $70. If you own a computer, the choice is a no-brainer. According to the New York Times:

There are two reasons for the decline, according to Nielsen. One is poverty: some low-income households no longer own TV sets, most likely because they cannot afford new digital sets and antennas.

The other is technological wizardry: young people who have grown up with laptops in their hands instead of remote controls are opting not to buy TV sets when they graduate from college or enter the work force, at least not at first. Instead, they are subsisting on a diet of television shows and movies from the Internet.

I had forgotten that there are places in which people can pick up several TV channels by using just an antenna. If I lived alone, I would give up TV entirely because I don’t have time to watch it. Link -via TYWKIWDBI

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Ownership of TV Sets Falls in U.S.

Bandwidth caps are all the rage these days, in North America and around the world. We’re talking about the notorious ceilings on how much broadband data you can use before your ISP starts charging you extra, or slowing down your connection, or shaping your traffic use (eg, blocking your access to certain applications).

AT&T's shiny new caps started on May 2: 150GB a month for DSL and 250GB for UVerse. AT&T customers will get a $10 charge if they cross the line, with that ding repeated for every 50GB thereafter. Comcast set a 250GB cap in 2008. Canadian ISPs have had them for a while, too.

Ars readers sometimes write in asking us how they can monitor their bandwidth use to avoid extra charges. Here are some links and pictures from major ISPs, which are broadly representative of the tools used by most Internet providers.

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Worried about data caps? Here’s how to check your usage

I am non discriminatory towards beer, hell, I drink our domestic water-flavored beer with a smile on my face. But I really want to try George Washington’s personal beer recipe. Even if’s no good, it’s freaking POTUS Beer 1.0. More

As more bacteria and algae are getting harder to kill, researchers are looking for new ways to eliminate them in water supplies. One idea is to unleash an electron-starved compound that will rip them apart. More

Talk about a twist- Steve Kass made noodles that are Möbius strips! You can see them cooked and ready for dinner at Flicker. Link -via Evil Mad Linkblog

(Image credit: Flickr user Steve Kass)

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Möbius Pasta

We recently looked at devilish automata from the 15th century; here’s Gustave Vichy’s mildly terrifying mechanical harpist, which was built in Paris in 1880. Her golden harp is invisible to the living; you can only see it on your deathbed. More

Using high-resolution scans of real human embryos, the BBC has created this somewhat terrifying animation of a fish-like, one-month-old embryo rapidly developing a face up to the 10-week mark. Yes, we all started out resembling Admiral Ackbar. More

Developer Michael Dewildt released a new plugin this week called WordPress Backup to Dropbox that will automatically create backups of your blog and upload them to your Dropbox account. About the plugin’s design and purpose, Dewildt said:

This has been created to give you piece of mind that your blog is backed up on a regular basis.
Just choose a day, time and how often you wish yor backup to be performed and kick back and wait for a zipped archive of your websites files and its database to be dropped in your Dropbox!

While not the only way to back up a WordPress site (we’ve talked about others before), Backup to Dropbox does join a short list of free WordPress backup options. With nearly 1,000 downloads yet this week, it seems to be pretty popular in the community so far.

What do you think? Will you give this plugin a shot and back your site up using Dropbox?

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WPCandy: New Backup to Dropbox plugin backs up your WordPress site for free