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.
Github is a much more social and connected platform than google code. Easier to find and fork projects and more of a neutral venue where different technologies can co-exist. Another interesting thing is that a lot of the google developers are on stackoverflow, which isn't google centric, but is very accessible as well.
Google is moving more and more code to Github (at least for public facing projects).
Google code is pretty much a corporate code repo from one decade ago.
[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