I'm interested in trying new things besides webhosting with the my first Linode, and I'm looking for some ideas. Please have in mind programs/applications that may appeal to a Linux newbie such as myself; I haven't done this many command-line operations since DOS.

One of the first things I'd like to do is to take advantage of the different geographic location of the Linode and set up SSH tunneling. This would be especially helpful when I'm outside of the US and want to access a site that has geographic restrictions. However, some of the web browsers I use are at public workstations where I cannot change SOCKS settings, and I think a personal proxy server accessible over http(s) would be a nice option. What solutions would you suggest? Ones with good documentation or even online tutorials would be most appreciated. Has anyone used Glype? And it seems to be in a different realm, but how about Squid?

Asterisk looks like a very interesting project to try out, but I'm afraid it may be above my skill level at this time.

I do some video encoding, and have thought of using some of the free CPU cycles to run jobs faster than my older machine can, but after taking into account the time it would take to transfer several gigabytes of raw material to the server, it didn't seem as worthwhile.

What fun uses have you found for your Linode that increase its value to you? I'd like to try some of them out!

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Amateur, eager to learn.
My hematology, oncology, and chemotherapy regimen wiki

Just remember to be a good VPS neighbor.

Your clock cycles and I/O are shared among your neighbors.

Continually maxing out "your share" means that your neighbors don't have any extra to burst with when needed for their "real" tasks.

Use what you need (you are after all paying for it), but don't max out your VPS just for the sake of maxing it out.

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Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

I hear you--I'm not looking to do something to keep things pegged at 100%, like a distributed computing project, and the encoding thought was just to show how little I know about other potential applications. My neighbors must currently love me since I/O is very modest, and CPU usage is typically <5%.

However, I really do wish to use this as an opportunity to try some things out and learn more about Linux. I learned the most about DOS back in the day when I needed to keep tinkering around to get games and such working, and I think the same opportunities are here.

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Amateur, eager to learn.
My hematology, oncology, and chemotherapy regimen wiki

If you're going to do squid, make sure you secure it. I made that mistake; accidentally left a poorly secured instance of Squid running (it was only supposed to be accessible internally, I messed up the permissions rule while debugging and forgot to reset it), and my linode turned into a spam gateway. These days I just avoid Squid in general.