My UNO just arrived yesterday. After a couple of hours fiddling with LED's and speakers I got a bit bored. I had ordered many shields and components of ebay to make a few projects, but they hadn’t arrived yet. I started to learn PYGTK and decided that for my first project i should make a Serial Monitor capable of receiving and sending data. After 2 hours of fiddling around (remember I’m new to pygtk) I finally finished. I may add more features in the future. Here is the link to github: https://github.com/RharryR/Arduino-Serial-Mate.
Let me know what you think 