ZFS is a free, open-source file system developed by Sun Microsystems for its Solaris operating system. The freeware is noted for its high capacity, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, novel on-disk structure, lightweight filesystems, and easy storage pool management. 

Or you can go by Sun's one liner description of their product, "ZFS, The Last Word In Filesystems."

The Apple tree, where rumors about Apple sprout and wither, is still buzzing over the news that the Mac OS X system, is looking to adopt ZFS. It's one of those things that Apple People would love to crunch their teeth on. Yes, it's still unconfirmed but that didn't stop StorageMojo from conjuring a scenario where MacLeopards are born with ZFS running within its electronic gene. In this fantasy world, StorageMojo enumerated the benefits of ZFS on the MacLeopard.

No More Corrupted Data
ZFS will eliminate data corruption due to power failures, flaky RAM, poor grounding, failing hard drives, driver glitches, and phantom writes. With ZFS, all blocks are checksummed and the checksum is stored in a parent block. ZFS always knows if the block is correct and/or corrupt making the entire data store self-validating.

No More RAID Cards or Controllers
ZFS implements very fast RAID that fixes the performance knock-off against software RAID making all writes the fastest kind. Simply add drives to your system and you have a fast RAID system minus the cables and enclosures required by SCSI and SATA drives.

No More Volumes
Each time a disk is added to the Mac, another disk icon appears on the desktop. ZFS eliminates concept of volume. Whether you're adding a disk or several disks to the system, it automatically joins the storage pool for greater capacity and less management.

Easy Backups
ZFS has a feature called snapshot copy. It creates a copy of all data at whatever any point in time. A backup is made by copying the snapshot to a disk, tape or NAS box. Snapshots can be created on every write just in case.

ZFS on a MacLeopard would be a great thing! If we only had a MacGenie to grant our wish!

Charles Schoenfeld gives us this freeware that serves as an Automator action for changing location-related settings and preferences. LocationSwitch v1.0 affects the settings of network location, sound volume, SMTP servers, automatic fetching of mail, enabling/disabling of individual e-mail accounts, and default printer selection.

The author of this app suggests that if you're routinely switching between two locations, better make two copies of this app - name each one to reflect your locations (e.g. SwitchHome and SwitchOffice). When starting up your computer from one location, click on your location's action to get started.

Customization is needed to have this software working. To apply personalized settings, LocationSwitch makes use of Applescript. Drag the icon for LocationSwitch onto the Automator icon and Automator will open, allowing you to customize it. Here's the detailed instructions from the download file:

In Steps 1 & 2:
Customize the alert and the network location to represent the relevant physical location.

In Step 3:
Customize your volume settings for the amount of ambient noise at the specified location.

In Step 4:
If you have more than two mail accounts set up, duplicate the line that changes the SMTP server as many times as necessary, editing the name of the account and the SMTP server for each.

In Steps 4 & 5 (yes, this also applies to Step 4):
Customize the names of your e-mail accounts (matching what you called them in Mail.app) and your SMTP servers.

In Steps 5 & 6 (yes, another instruction that applies to Step 5):
You may need to change some instances of the word "false" to "true" if you're trying to turn things on rather than off.

In Step 7:
Change "Home Queue" to the name of your default printer at the specified location (exactly matching the name of that printer in your Printer Setup Utility application).

Finally, delete any steps that you don't want to use. I recommend doing this last, so that the numbering of steps in the instructions above still makes sense. (Seasoned Applescripters will realize that I could have combined Steps 4Â?7 into a single step. This is why I didn't. Some people will not want to use every step, and separating them makes them easier to delete selectively.)

Download: [LocationSwitch]

In 1995 I purchased a first-generation Apple Power PC 8100. At the time, I worked mostly with music and graphic files, and was certain that the 750 MB hard drive would serve me well for many years...

Today, I have a G4 Graphite model with two hard drives - the original 20 GB and an additional 80 GB. And they are fillin' up fast!

Now, a full hard drive isn't necessarily a bad thing... it means you've been happy and productive. You should be proud of yourself. On the other hand, files of all kinds are not getting any smaller, and frankly, its a pain offloading everything to zip drives and other media - or having to buy a new HD at a moment's notice.

We've rounded up eleven ways for you to give your hard drive a break, check them out in the Full Article!

Grab this full-featured HTML and PHP editor freeware for your Mac OS X that has everything a beginner or a pro would want:

Syntax Checking

• After a good few hours in front of your computer you're likely to have left some open tags in there. This feature ensures that there are no mistakes in your HTML documents.

Tag Coloring

• Customize your tag coloring settings to breeze through your syntax and markups.

Code Clips

• It allows you to easily store, manage, and access frequently used segments of markup with designated keyboard shortcuts.

Preview

• It supports preview for Camino, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, and Safari.

Live Preview

• Why wait to finish when you can edit your document in real time? It allows you to see changes in how your document renders while you are editing it.

Insert Wizards

• A neophyte's best bud. These wizards can be useful for a novice trying to learn HTML, or for an advanced user trying to save time. The Image Map wizard in particular is very advanced and enormously simplifies the process of creating image maps.
  

Download: [Taco HTML v1.7.2]

Monolingual is a freeware application that will remove the unnecessary language resources installed by default in Mac OS X. This program will help in freeing several hundred MBs of disk space. For this to run, it requires at least a Mac OS C 10.3.9 and will also work on Mac OS X 10.4.

This was written by J. Schrier and I. Stein and is released under the GNU General Public License.

When using this program though, make sure to uncheck all the "Architecture" options. With Monolingual's help, one can now store files without having to bother oneself with the available disk space in one's Mac.

Download [Monolingual 1.3.2]