ngetsuite is a collection of ruby scripts for retrieving binaries from Usenet. It uses nget and yydecode for fetching and decoding, stores the article headers in a MySQL database, and comes with a eruby web interface for remote control.
Rice is a Ruby implementation of the Information and Content Exchange (ICE) protocol. It implements an ICE syndicator (publisher) and ICE subscriber. Rice may be useful as a reference implementation or a public syndicator for testing.