All,
I've been learning python for the last 6 weeks through edX, and it's going pretty well. But I was wondering, what can I actually do with it apart from writing programme for the sake of writing?
I know that my colleagues write plug-ins for software in Python, but I'm not sure how you go about doing that.
Any advice?

Something useful would be a tool to take a file containing a list of line-separated strings, shuffle them, and split them into groups so that we can run large-scale multi-week polls more easily (CC's polls of years gone by, or Caz's director poll). If it could dump this into a CSV file, and record the outcomes it could then produce the subsequent rounds in a similar fashion.

What I now about Python comes from some tinkering with it in Poser, and a little in a font editing application I have. If those apps did not support it, I'd be none the wiser.

Python/Perl are very good for language analysis based coding/scripting (having used both in uni for this task over a c based compiled language)

Maybe write something that could use a python variant of cURL (http://curl.haxx.se/) to get pages from the forum and based on a baysian filter system see who has the spammiest post?

It's a useful (and funny) way to put what you have learned into practice. There is also Project Euler if you are aslo mathematically inclined (mine has been incredibly lacking as I haven't had time to work on it)

Python is one of the languages made easy to access on the preferred Raspberry Pi Linux distro.