Scraping Kickstarter projects with certain keywords and sending yourself an email, a tool for slicing csv files, reimagining various basic command line tools in new languages, a tool to scan a file with an unused filename in the current directory, a program to sort music by idv3 tags, an http media server, etc...

All of these would show 1. basic language ability, 2. some simple algorithms, 3. ability to do something to completion.