Wibtown

Roundhay Park’s Tropical World has had a meerkat exhibition for over a year now I think but it was only recently that I managed to see them for myself and take a few photos. Unfortunatly they are housed behind some glass which could do with a good clean so most of the photos didn’t come out too well, infact it was a pretty bad day for photography all round as the lens fogged up in the butterfly house and with nothing free of grit to clean it with it didn’t clear up again until I got to the meerkats.

Next time I must remember to take a lens cloth.

If you own an eeePC an have looked into upgrading it you may have heard of Runcore SSDs which are a direct replacement for the SSD which comes with the eeePC as standard and are far far quicker. The problem for 701SD users though is that the 701SD never seems to be mentioned in the compatibility list for the devices which leads many people to wonder if they will work with the 701SD.

The good news is that I received the 16GB RCP-I-S7016-C yesterday and it works fine, was very easy to install and has made my XP installation run far quicker than it had previously even though I’d already upgraded the memory to 2GB.

I don’t know if all models of Runcore SSDs built for eeePCs will work and I don’t know if the model number mentioned will work with different versions of  the 701 but if you have a 701SD it’s worth getting.

To install it’s simply a matter of removing the back panel of the eeePC and then replacing the original SSD by removing a couple of screws. One thing to keep in mind is that you will have to reinstall your operating system so you will either need an external DVD drive or a bootable memory device with the needed files.

I’m not sure if any artist could sound quite as insane as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins does whilst singing I Put a Spell on You but Marilyn Manson gives it ago with his cover any way.

I’m not sure what album the original was originally released on but it can be found on I Put a Spell on You: The Best of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. The cover is on the Marilyn Manson album Smells Like Children.

Original

Cover

I’m not sure which musical genre this weeks cover would fit in to, in fact I’m not even sure that I like it that much but it does score highly on the strangeness factor and as such is a perfect candidate for different versions.

The song covered is A Small Victory by Faith No More and it has been given a very strange reworking by Germ Theory with vocals that sound for the most part like they have been sung under water or highly distorted and instruments that go from being very clear to blasts of distortion and static noise this isn’t going to be for everyone.

A Small Victory can be found on Faith No More’s album Angel Dust whilst the cover is on Tribute Of The Year A Tribute To Faith No More.

Original

Cover

The Carphone Warehouse are selling the ASUS eee SD701 with Windows XP for a very reasonable £154. Perfect for it you need a small laptop to take on your travels.

Again I had problems coming up with this weeks different version but this time it was down to too much choice rather than too little. During the week I was searching Spotify for some Ring of Fire covers when I came across a band called the Leningrad Cowboys and their album Zombies Paradise.

This is what caused my dillema as it’s an album full of covers all done in a heavy metal style and pretty much everyone of them is worth a different versions post. Unfortunately as I’m trying not to use any particular artist more than once for these posts it left me with the difficult choice of just picking one of the tracks.

In the end I decided to go for the cover of Ring of Fire as whilst it’s not my favourite track on the album it’s the track that I originally set out to find and by sticking with it it makes my life a little easier.

The original version is by Johnny Cash and can be found on his Ring of Fire album whilst the cover can be found on Leningrad Cowboys Zombies Paradise.

Original

Cover