Here's a bunch of stuff that I find interesting. Bioengineering Research - The cell is amazing and leads to to some interesting systems and processes. BioPOEMS My undergraduate honors thesis on Nanoplasmonic Probes Interesting Articles: Intro to MEMS Ray Bradybury on space travel and The Great Years Ahead (an AWESOME speech) Richard Feynman on nanotechnology LaTeX - An awesome typesetting language for making stuff that actually looks good. Beats the hell out of Word and other WYSIWYG editors for school work, papers, articles and technical reports. Once you try it you won't go back. Like crack. Mac: Install pdfLatex from Fink , install TeXShop (you don't need the II2 packages and extra crap, just the application) and then in the TexShop Preferences > Engine change the pdfTex path to /sw/bin/. That's it! PC: MikTeX is good from what I hear. Server - How to setup your own server and good, free, open source software to run off of it. In order to host your own website all you need is a personal computer and an internet connection, preferably broadband. As long as your ISP doesn't block port 80, there is no reason why you can't host your own website for free. If you can get a static ip address from your ISP then you can register your own domain name or follow the next step, like what I did for this site. Most people with broadband connections have dynamic IP addresses and Otherwise, you should go to DynDNS.org to get setup with their Dynamic DNS or Static DNS service. This will give you a handy, easy to remember address like eatbabykittens.dyndns.org. Mmmmm, tasty! If you used DynDNS, follow their instructions to get setup. If you registered a domain, you need to have DNS servers that point to your webserver. But running your own DNS server is a pain, especially considering that there are free options like ZoneEdit.com out there. Go to their site and get setup with them. Now you need Apache, the webserver that the vast majority of the web is hosted on! There are versions for just about every platform out there and there are plenty of instructions on the web. After you've installed Apache, you are ready to get on your soapbox and freely publish almost anything that you want. Help these guys out if you want to keep this right! Other things that you may want to install include PHP and MySQL to enable more advanced tools like scripting and databases. You can even run your own online store using software like osCommerce. All of this software is very well documented and there are plenty of tutorials and other people that you use them online; you aren't alone and there's plenty of free support out there. Now you have all of the necessary ingredients to setup an awesome cookbook recipe database that all of your friends can add to. You can even install PHPWiki and run your own WikiWikiWeb server. Someday it could become as awesome as Wikipedia. If you use iCal on Mac OS X and want to be able to synchronize your calendars with other people you can enable WebDAV in Apache using instructions here. Other things to do include home automation and the huge number of things that these guys have given instructions for. Reading - An essay on smart people making stupid decisions and other fun facts. Nothing spectacular and a little bit rushed but the references are good.