Sake is a RubyGem by Chris Wanstrath which executes and manages system-wide Rake tasks. Whereas Rake is project-specific, Sake allows the developer to examine, install, run, and uninstall Rake files and tasks globally, much like the way Rubygems does this for Ruby libraries.

Paul Dowman has put together a feature-packed Ruby on Rails focused "appliance" for Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud - effectively an on-demand, flexible VPS service). Those who know what they're doing can try it out right away, using the AMI id: ami-4e907527.

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Gregory Brown has put together a great four-page tutorial on how to build a database driven console application using Ruby and ActiveRecord (no Rails needed!). As well as delivering what the title suggests, Brown also looks at some neat Ruby techniques for structuring applications in general (such as using modules and module_function). The end result is an app called "EarGTD," a basic time / task management tool.