In the past I’ve reviewed Mind Manager – an excellent piece of software for producing mind maps – a tool I that forms part of my daily work flow for information gathering and organizing. However I’ve recently discovered something called "Personal Brain" from TheBrain.com that really takes mind mapping to a whole new level.

The problem I’ve always had with a mind map is that it’s essentially only two dimensional. You start at the ‘root’ node and work outwards in a hierarchy. You can create any number of hierarchy from the centre; but problems start to occur when you want to link from one hierarchy to another. Things start to get complicated and a complex map can be difficult to navigate and locate the information you need.

The Personal Brain takes a more 3 dimensional approach to organizing data. You can link nodes to multiple parents and to multiple children allowing for a network of cross links between information nodes. In addition to linking parents and children you can ‘jump’ create links to other topics. These are links to topics that are related but don’t form part of the current parent / child hierarchy. I guess an example might help:

Here we see my TulligWeather server is a child of Servers; but because it is weather related there’s a jump link to Met Eireann. In practice this makes it simple to create complex relationships between topics and yet make them easy to navigate.

As well as creating the topics you can add notes and attachments to them as well as giving them a type and adding tags. The latter allows you to view the tags as a virtual topic showing you all the topics with that tag. Here’s a shot showing a PHP tag and it’s associated topics.

Full search capabilities and and trail of recently accessed items make locating items in unrelated parts of a map easy. Additionally you can pin major topics to the top of the work area to help facilitate moving around different parts of your ‘brain’.

Personal Brain is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. That last one is a big bonus for me as I’m using Linux most of the time at present. The Linux version does have some features that don’t work like dragging files onto a topic to create an attachment; but for most things there’s a valid work around and I haven’t found anything that I really couldn’t do. There’s 3 versions available; free, Core and Pro. The free version has quite a few restrictions; but should still be usable. The Pro version includes integration with Microsoft Office, integrated calendar and a number of other useful features; but is very expensive at $249. I’ve been trialing the Pro version which is die to expire in a few days. Due to current financial constraints I’ll be switching to the free version at that time and I’ll let you know how that works out.

There’s nothing makes me reach for the blog faster than the feeling I’ve been ripped off and this is certainly the case with the video game Dirt2 on the Wii.

I’m a long term fan of motor sport video games ever since I owned Gran Tourismo on the PS2. I rue the day I gave that to my daughter in favour of a Wii. So I was delighted to see the announcement of Dirt2 available on the Wii platform. However I was hugely disappointed when I fired up my console and started the game.

Right from the opening sequence the game displays the poor quality graphics that are present throughout, though thankfully not quite as bad as the opening sequence. The game is divided into the usual arcade mode and championship mode in which you can unlock new vehicles and ‘body kits’, the latter being little more than alternative skins for the cars. There are very few cars available even once you’ve unlocked them and no upgrade or maintenance facilities.

The racing itself is reasonable; but here again the poor quality graphics really show the game up. Surrounding textures, trees for example, are little more than green blobby things and there’s little in the way of distant textures. The vehicles don’t show any highlights and even though we’re racing on dirt there’s no clouds of dust to obscure the view. The driving experience is OK; but there’s very little available in the way of drift. Touch the brakes to try and fish tail the back end in a corner and your more likely just to come to a stop than slide round the bend. The AI cars frequently don’t put up much of a fight and will often brake hard on a straight stretch for no apparent reason. They’ll usually do this at the same point on each lap so you can predict where it’ll be easy to pass them. Altogether unsatisfying.

You can play the game using a variety of different controller combinations and I started using the Wii remote and nunchuck, which was OK. However I then switched to the Wii steering wheel. Turning the wheel is supposed to steer the car, only it doesn’t! The car is almost completely unresponsive to the steering wheel necessitating a switch back to the nunchuck for steering.

Once you’ve won a race you can sit back and watch a replay of your triumph. Or can you?

For a start pressing A on the remote to continue after a race is often misinterpreted as a double press which takes you right past the replay menu and out to the race menu again. At this point you’ve lost the ability to watch the replay. If you do get to watch a replay the results are very poor:

• The replay is often jerky so you twitch round corners rather than gliding round them
• Again there’s no improvement in the overall video quality, no highlights or clouds of dust
• Your vehicle will have a shadow; but the AI vehicles often have no shadow at all which looks weird and is just sloppy programming
• If your car leaves the track and flies though the air it carries its under body shadow with it which makes it look like it’s flying on a big sheet of something. Poor!

The final nail in the games coffin for me is that most of the replays terminate before the race is over so you never get to see yourself cross the winning line. How naff is that? I’m not sure; but it might be dependent on the particular track. On at least one replay I watched it ended half way round the last lap. !?!

I think the only saving grace for this game is the sound track which contains some pretty catchy rock tunes without too much grunge. So while you’re waiting for your race replay to end prematurely you can at least listen to a nice ditty. This earned the game its second star.

Finally I have to say that as a racing experience Dirt2 way, way better than Mario Cart Wii and for that reason I’ll continue to play it; but come on Codemasters, you can do better than this.

This software seemed like a great idea – something that would automatically backup my files as and when they’d changed. Unfortunately the reality fell far, far short of the promise with software that functioned very poorly and support to match.

Functionally this software looks very good. You create backup ‘plans’ in which you decide where you want the backup files to go and then select which areas you want to backup. This you can do by selecting from a set of quick picks, e.g. My Documents, My Pictures, My Music etc; or you can select directories from the file system or you can choose files by their Tag. Grand.

Once you chosen the files to backup the Memeo goes off and makes an initial backup of everything you’ve selected. CPU usage during this process is very high, which is only to be expected really, so it’s best to start this process at night or let it run over a weekend.

After the initial copy has been made then Memeo runs in the System Tray and every time you save a file it gets backed up. You can also keep a number of copies of files, which is good for things like documents.

So things were going well for me and my Memeo. I created a few plans to backup everything I have on disk, documents in one plan, pictures in another…. Away Memeo went merrily backing everything up. However after a couple of days I noticed that when I saved a file there was no longer a little pop up to say the file had been backed up. When I opened Memeo I found that all the backup plans had stopped working several days before.

There’s an active support forum for this product so I posted my problem and got a response from someone in Memeo support:

Delete all the backup plans in the file system and start again.

Now to me that doesn’t sound like a solution, it sounds like a desperate measure. Not being offered any alternatives that’s what I did. There are instructions in the forum for ‘reactivating’ a backup; but these didn’t work as documented so I deleted all my backups and started again.

However the same thing happened again a few days later. I reported the problem again and was given the same response; start again. Even after emailing the log files to Memeo support the response was; delete all the plans and start again.

To cut a long story short here I’ve done this ’start again’ process at least 5 times now. I’ve had Memeo customer support do a remote access session on my PC to try to find the problem. After that they downgraded my Memeo version from Premium to Standard; but the same thing happened. After that their suggestion was (you’ve guessed it) delete all the plans and start again.

In addition to the problem with the plans that stopped working I’ve also had he following issues with the software:

• With all plans suspended (paused) the software was still using between 50% and 90% of the CPU (Intel Core 2 2.13GHz). This meant I couldn’t just pause the plans, I had to quit the software altogether.
• Once I got to more that 5 plans they’d (the plans) would start disappearing off the list meaning I could no longer edit their configuration or remove the plan.
• Plans could not be reactivated once a plan had been deleted. I was a case of starting the whole thing again from scratch.

In defense of the software I will say that I’m running it on Vista Ultimate SP1. Maybe it runs fine on XP; but given the activity in the support forum and the huge FAQ list of issues I’m not convinced of this.

I’ve given the software one star because

• Louder Voice won’t let me give it 0 stars
• It deserves something for being a good idea

If I ever get the software working properly I’ll update this review.