If you’re into image manipulation effects, you might find Adobe Pixel Bender interesting. Pixel Bender is a shader language. A shader is a small piece of code that specifies a pixel-wise operation that can be applied to every pixel on a bitmap.
This Flash 10 demo features an “old film” effect and a 3D tomato 
Asus F3SV
My laptop (Asus F3SV) died last week. This is an expensive laptop that was state of the art 2.5 years ago when I got it from the university. I ran a dual-boot Vista/Opensuse on it. It was a nice fast full-featured laptop but not so durable.
Thanks to recent developments of the Flash platform, we now have not only a real programming language in Flash (Actionscript 3), but there is also a free development kit to compile SWF files, Flex. Flex 4 (the newest version) is entirely based on Java, so it’s easy to install. Download it here (see the link at the bottom of the page). Just unzip the file and put the bin/ directory in your PATH. It also comes with a debug version of the Flash player (which displays debug output such as trace() statements or errors on the terminal), which is found in flex4/runtimes/player/10/.
Spinning globe + 20 objects in 3D
The MD2 (Quake 2) format is easy to understand. It uses only a single texture to define the model material, and animations are easy to parse. They are usually simple low-poly too, great for Flash 3D programming. MD2 models are mostly animated characters, but you can also find static objects in MD2.