In OS X any file or folder whose name is prefixed with a period is automatically invisible to the Finder and Terminal unless specifically requested.

Sometimes though, one might want to hide a file (or folder) without changing its name. Fortunately OS X provides a means to do this too. In the Terminal the command:

chflags hidden /path/to/my_secrets.txt


will hide my_secrets.txt from the Finder (but not the Terminal). The following command will reverse the action:

chflags nohidden /path/to/my_secrets.txt


Note that while the file is hidden from the Finder it is still accessible to the OS.

Trust me, you will feel the performance difference of a modern SSD in day to day computing. That’s far more than I can say for most of today’s CPU and memory upgrades. The transition from magnetic storage to solid state storage is nothing less than a breakthrough. It’s already transformative; I can only imagine how fast, cheap, and large these drives are going to be in a few years. If you’ve ever wondered what performance would be like if everything was in RAM all the time — well, we just got one step closer to that.

“Recording information is an inherent part of our humanity. As we evolve, we create more efficient means of storing this information. Since the creation of computers, we have greatly increased our ability to store and access large quantities of information.” Gorgeous infographic.

The coolest thing about RAID-Z: self-healing data. In addition to handling whole-disk failure, RAID-Z can also detect and correct silent data corruption. Whenever you read a RAID-Z block, ZFS compares it against its checksum. If the data disks didn’t return the right answer, ZFS reads the parity and then does combinatorial reconstruction to figure out which disk returned bad data. It then repairs the damaged disk and returns good data to the application.

A distributed key-value storage system designed for persistent object storage and retrieval (not caching). It conforms to memcache protocol (with caveats), so any memcached client can have connectivity with it. MemcacheDB uses Berkeley DB as a storage backend, so lots of features including transaction and replication are supported.

An open-source replacement for .mac services.

Open-source NAS software for large volume storage. [via]