My window manager of choice is "Enlightenment 17":http://enlightenment.org/, which has been in development for at least the past seven years, when I started using it. While generally awesome, e17 has never had a stable release, which means that features sometimes break. Last November, my theme of choice, "Milky's":http://exchange.enlightenment.org/theme/show/1594, stopped displaying the titlebar properly. Since the last release of the theme was from early 2010, I finally decided to learn about the e17 theming system and fix the problem.

Fancy file systems are all the rage. "ZFS":http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+zfs/whatis, "btrfs":https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org, and even Microsoft's new "ReFS":http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-next-generation-file-system-for-windows-refs.aspx include data deduplication features. However, these techniques can use a lot of memory, and new file systems are often not nearly as stable as tried and true file systems, such as "ext3/ext4":https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/ or "XFS":http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/. Experimenting with file systems is fun; however, in this case, I am not about to trust all of my data to a new file system just to remove duplicate files. Instead, I decided to deduplicate my files using a few scripts. The end result: over 12GB of saved space after just a few minutes of scanning my hard drive. With hard drive prices sky high (but slowly coming down), this will help me last another 6 months before I have to upgrade my hard drives again.