A couple of months ago, I met a brilliant scientist[1][2] who runs a space startup in India that specializes in brokering deals to launch non Indian space payload on ISRO's launch vehicles.
Her company is called Earth2Orbit[3], although I am not sure whether this deal was brokered by them.
Currently on Ubuntu running Unity. Was a long time KDE user running various distros with KDE environment.
For someone who cannot afford a Mac and needs a -nix based system for day to day development activities, Ubuntu seems to provide the right set of features.
I might have tried to use a Mac had it been cheaper, but now moving away from Linux would be worth some thought for me.
Well, all I can suggest you is to build something you're passionate about. Try looking at a small problem that you can solve with this tools. Someone I know did an awesome thing with Python, Raspberry Pi and few sensors. He created a simple setup that would bring down the curtains of his room once the intensity of sunlight outside went beyond a certain threshold. This allowed him to have an hour of extra sleep :)
A way to bet on a sport/game via Twitter would be an interesting thing to do. Couple of months ago, I actually looked for ways to do it around the Twitter's cards API but never managed to get beyond the initial thoughts of doing so.
[1] http://travel.cnn.com/mumbai/susmita-mohanty-indias-own-moon...
[2] http://www.earth2orbit.com/people/people.html
[3] http://www.earth2orbit.com/index.html