If you’re like me then you probably spend more time working on your laptop outside of your office than inside. This also includes surfing facebook on your iphone while waiting in line at the coffeshop. By now you probably already know of just how insecure wireless really is, but how can you ensure that no matter where you are, you’re safe?
Simple answer: a VPN service.

It acts as a secure connection between your computer or iphone (or any electronic device for that matter, including your boxee, etc..) and them, sending out requests to websites, email accounts, etc.. all through THEIR secure connection. Stops people from being able to sniff your connection, stops people from stealing your data, most importantly, it can also enable you to use service like spotify which are currently only allowing certain countries to sign up. Don’t worry, VPN services are typically cheap, so what you need to look for when choosing a VPN provider is the options and level of security they provide.

How many different countries do they have VPN accounts available in? What level of security do they use?

I’ve used a few different services through the years, even attempting to run my own via openvpn, but so far the easiest (and well, cheapest without losing security features) one has been overplay.net. They’re widely known for their strong level of anonymous/secure surfing not to mention their ability to access location restrictive TV content. Anyhow, they’re worth at least checking out. The service is only $9.95 a month and you get access to all their vpn servers spanning 20 countries around the world. Not to shabby right? Ohh, and not to leave out – they accept paypal..

http://www.addto10.com/?p=191

While there are probably a good number of apps that I use on a daily basis, there are only a few dvelopement companies behind these tools that I actually have a strong admiration/nerd-crush for. One of these companies is Panic, creator of my all-time favorite FTP client and Web Development tools Transmit & Coda. On their blog they typically show-off upcoming features, status updates on various projects and just all-around random shit that they find interesting online. Trust me, while it’s definitely a company blog they’ve got a loyal following thanks to the interesting posts that pepper the typical product/marketing dev. updates. This is a prime example. They just posted a pic/feature-list on a new project that they’ve been working on that’s an easy-to-digest project status-board, or as they’ve called it “the panic board.” Primarily using AJAX this status board will give any team member privy to their internal network a one-screen update on where in the development cycles any number of projects might be in. Not only that but according to the blog it also incorporates streaming twitter updates, email announcements, the company calendar and even the local Tri-Met Bus Arrival calendar for employees who rely on the bus to get to and from work (hey, they’ve got an API, why not use it?!). The blog post then goes on to make any data nerd squeal with the admission that they’re using a 46″ Samsung LCD Video Wall Display to keep the team within eyeshot of the status board. Very cool.

Now by no means is this the first or even one of the first examples of global ‘status board’ type pages that have been setup for both internal and external use. One of my favorite examples of a public project status page is the one featured on the right in the header image, found over on the Culture Code company website. These are the guys behind the OSX & iPhone to-do application called “Things.” They’ve created a project status page in the form of an airport arrival/departure screen. What’s cool about this is as the user you’re able to see not only the status on various product updates, but also see who in the company is working on that particular issue and when they last updated the sheet.

Other notable one-page project update tools is one recently put in place by the Boulder office of ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, shown below.

It’s a quick way of seeing how far along any given project is in the office, sorting by account, due date, job-type, Creative Director or Producer assigned to the piece. It’s also got a status bar so if you’re across the room you can see at a glance whether or not something has already started (or is about to be finished). They apparently have this sucker projected on the main wall in the inner-depths of the office. Having been forced to deal with so many archiac ways of managing projects at advertising agencies, this is definitely a step in the right direction (if you’re a project manager/producer/in the traffic dept.). I’m sure the creatives will hate this visual reminder of what work they haven’t done yet….so bonus points are awarded there. What it needs though is some color, maybe even little avatars/graphics to help people find specific types of projects without having to scan the entire board…just a thought.

Here are some twitter tools/tricks that you’ll probably never see in 99% of those ‘twitter lists’ out there. When you have so many applications that do either the same thing but with a different face or don’t really do anything at all, these are some tricks/tools that will actually help you stay productive…especially if you’re a Twitter/data junkie.

TweepML
Before there was twitter lists, there was TweepML. The funny thing is I still use this more than twitter lists because you can easily import/export your lists in csv format. Essentially its simple format designed to help share lists of twitter users. Plus you can auto-follow part or all of TweepML lists directly from within the site. two thumbs up.

TwitPic JSON API
This app was released upon the world by Remy Sharp when he wanted an easier way to pull out all of his uploaded photos from TwitPic (Their API only allows you to upload to the site, not download from your account).Source is available on GitHub.

Twavatar
If you’ve ever developed a twitter app that pulls a users profile picture you’ve undoubtedly run into the problem that occurs every time that they change it, all of a sudden the link doesn’t work and the photo’s gone! Well, fret no more because Damon Cortesi (@dacort) put out an appspot hosted permalink to be able to grab anyone’s updated twitter profile picture. Very useful.

Amy Iris – An AI chat bot for twitter. This one’s a very easily adaptable AI chat bot for twitter. The possibilities are endless for adaption into your projects. Check it out, it’s really a cool framework that they give you.

Now the last one isn’t a tool but rather a Twitter trick:

Want to download ANYONE’s previous 3,200 tweets? Easy! Just fire off the following curl command replacing where it says username with the desired tweeter’s name and you’ll soon have the last 3,200 tweets of theirs all to yourself. This one is also courtesy of @dacort.

curl -O “http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/username.xml?count=100&page=[1-32]“

Here’s a giant list of over 120 Google Wave Robots that you can add to your account! Enjoy!

Read Onlie readonliebot@appspot.com – Records the original wave content. Whenever it’s edited, the content is replaced with the original. Simple as that.

Seekdroid – seekdroid@appspot.com – You can list Robots, add them and find them out, easy to use. In continuous development. Website with all the information seekdroid.appspot.com.

Taggy – taggy-wave@appspot.com – Recognize #hashtags and add them as tags to the wave.

BingyBot – Bingybot@appspot.com – Answers your questions using the Bing.com search engine

Dr Maps – dr-maps@appspot.com – Updates a wave by inserting a map associated to an address.

Dr Weather – shiny-sky@appspot.com – Gives the weather for a City

Embedded Search Results – wave-sandbox@appspot.com – Web and Image searches inline.

FML Blipper – fmlblipper@appspot.com – displays random FML story from www.fmylife.com

Grauniady – grauniady@appspot.com – Searches the latest items from The Guardian for a given phrase.

Stocky – stocky-wave@appspot.com – Detects stock symbols from a wave and updates it with the live stock price.

Wavedirectory – wavedirectory@appspot.com – a bot for public waves, which adds the wave to a directory and lets it be evaluated.

Wavethingy – wavethingy@appspot.com – Searches Amazon for DVDs and books, and gives the author a cut of any purchases made off the links.

WorldCat-Bot – worldcat-bot@appspot.com – Provides links to www.worldcat.org searches, based on user-defined queries.

Tocgen – tocgen@appspot.com – Table of Contents auto-generated and updated based on the h1,h2,h3,h4 in a wave.

Polly the Pollster ( polly-wave@appspot.com ): Creates and distributes multiple choice poll questions.

Yelpful ( yelpful@appspot.com ): Adds an in-wave interface to Yelp.com

RSSyBot ( rssybot@appspot.com ): Adds an RSS feed to Wave.

TwitUsernames ( twitusernames@appspot.com ): Links @usernames to Twitter.com.

Blog bot ( blog-bot@appspot.com ): Publishes waves to blog posts.

Aesthetic Bots Emoticony ( emoticonbot@appspot.com ): Turns smiley faces into images.

Sweepy ( sweepy-wave@appspot.com ): Removes empty blips.

Silly Bots Eliza the Robot Shrink ( elizarobot@appspot.com ): Talks to you when no one else will.

Swedish Chef ( borkforceone@appspot.com ): Bork bork bork!

Flippy ( flippy-wave@appspot.com ): Flips text upside down.

Bouncy – ( bouncy-wave@appspot.com ) – Bounces users (bots only for now) out of the wave

Public – public@a.gwave.com – gives a wave the public feature

blog-wave@appspot.com – posts the wave to your Blogger blog

Emoticony – emoticonbot@appspot.com – Turns smiley faces into images.

Flippy – flippy-wave@appspot.com – flips text upsidedown

Kanye West – imma-let-u-finish@appspot.com – Kanye West bot… much lulz: Kanye West Public Wave

last-robot@appspot.com – shows a user’s last played song on last.fm

Polly – polly-wave@appspot.com – Poll bot

Sweepy – sweepy-wave@appspot.com – Cleans out empty “blips” from your wave

Twitusernames – twitusernames@appspot.com – Converts @usernames into Twitter.com urls

Eliza – elizarobot@appspot.com – The Google Wave Psychologist

Hangman – wavehangman@appspot.com – Play hangman with a bot

BotURL – boturl@appspot.com – Converts full urls into hyperlinks (which wave seems to do)

Yelpful – yelpful@appspot.com – Adds an in-wave interface to Yelp.com

RSSyBot – rssybot@appspot.com – Adds an RSS feed to Wave.

Blog bot – blog-bot@appspot.com – Publishes waves to blog posts.

Swedish Chef – borkforceone@appspot.com – Bork bork bork!

Wave Alpha – py-robot@appspot.com – Uses Wolfram Alpha to calculate clever stuff and query Wolfram Alpha.

WaveGroupy – wavegroupy@appspot.com – A browsable group aggregator for public waves

WaveVotely – wavevotely@appspot.com – With a tiny gadget, votely allows you to vote public waves up/down; enabling high-quality content to float up.

Wikify – wikifier@appspot.com – Adds Wikipedia links for topics

MPP – wave-xmpp@appspot.com – Allows you to subscribe to waves so that your receive notifications via XMPP when users modify them (Confirmed that this works outside the sandbox!)

Tweety – tweety-wave@appspot.com – Displays your twitter feed in a Wave

Skimmy – wave-skimmy@appspot.com – Similar to Emoticony, but it turns faces into animated images.

FML – fmylifey@appspot.com – Upon being added to Wave, it will announce its presence by posting a random FML

Piratify – piratify@appspot.com – Converts wave text into pirate-speak

RickRolley – rickrolley@appspot.com – Rick Roll a wave (please do not use this one in public, god will kill a kitten)

Rosy Etta – rosy@appspot.com – Translation bot

Woot – woot@appspot.com -

Wave Moderator – wave-moderator@appspot.com

ICUBots – icubots@appspot.com – Googlewavebots.info’s bot spider

Wave Archive – wavearchive@appspot.com

Embeddy – embeddy@appspot.com

SlashChuck – slashchuckbot@appspot.com

WP Bot – wp-bot@appspot.com

Verse Seeker – verseseeker@appspot.com

Wave Email Notifications – wave-email-notifications@appspot.com

Quran Wave – quranwave@appspot.com

My Wave ID – mywaveid@appspot.com – Creates a blip at the end of the wave, containing the current wave ID, both in “wave” and full url formats. Can just be taken out of the wave afterwards (only works upon being added).

Easy Public – easypublic@appspot.com

ComicSans Killer – comic-sans-killer@appspot.com

BaaS – buddyasaservice@appspot.com

Wavy – wavy-robot@appspot.com

Board Game Geeky – boardgamegeeky@appspot.com – Adds links for capitalised boardgame titles to the appropriate page on http://boardgamegeek.com

Contrepwave – contrepwaverobot@appspot.com – French robot that diplays all the spoonerisms containing the longest word of a blip (if size >5) / Robot listant les contrepeteries contenant le mot le plus long du blip, si ce mot est plus long que 5 lettres.

Eliza – ogenex@appspot.com – An implementation of the Eliza chatbot borrowed from the NLTK.

Rude chatbot – notatory@appspot.com – An obnoxious chatbot borrowed from the Natural Language Processing Toolkit.

TooAngel Wave – wave@appspot.com – A self learning robot, that will respond to a reply in a more humanoid way

Converty – converty-bot@appspot.com – This bot will do in place unit conversions for simple units. Abbreviations not yet supported.

Calcbot – calcbot@appspot.com – This bot will do in place calculations for simple mathematical expressions and allow you to use user defined variables.

Cartoony – cartoonybot@appspot.com – Replaces the text of every submitted blip with a cartoon balloon that contains the text instead. Colors the balloons based on username.

Dice Bot – dice-bot@appspot.com – Dice-rolling bot. Dice Bot will replace XdY (X is the number of dice; Y is the number of sides) with the results of those rolls.

Fnordlinky – fnordlinks@appspot.com – Replaces “PMID ” with article information from PubMed.

Hearty Emobot – hearty-emobot@appspot.com – Replaces ASCII art with wingding characters.

i-cron – i-cron@appspot.com – Evaluates Python expressions. Looks at blips in event, searches for CALC() macros and executes Python code using exec().

IMDbotty – imdbotty@appspot.com – Replaces links to movies/TV shows on IMDb with a gadget that displays basic information (cover, title, rating, etc…).

Inbeddable – inbeddable@appspot.com – Converts links to embedded objects

Insulty – megabytemb123@appspot.com – Information Needed

IPA Bot – ipa-bot@appspot.com – Changes normal letters into special characters used for phonetics.

Plotzie – plotzie@appspot.com – Plots sparklines from your data.

Simlerbot – simlerbot@appspot.com – Does www.simler.com link formatting (@ links to twitter profiles, # links to twitter searches, ~ links to simler profiles, [] links to simler tag page.)

Smiley – Smiley_wave@appspot.com – Replaces common ascii smileys with image emoticons.

Syntaxy – kasyntaxy@appspot.com – Syntaxy does blip-by-blip syntax highlighting for a variety of languages including Python, Java, C, C++, html, css and javascript.

Watexy – watexy@appspot.com – Use LaTeX mathematical language in your Waves!

Bard Bot – bardbot@appspot.com – Play many text adventure games.

Roshambo – roshambowave@appspot.com – Play Roshambo (Rock / Paper / Scissors).

Groupy – groupy-robot@appspot.com – Robot to manage groups.

Groupy2 – groupy-the-bot@appspot.com – Robot to manage groups.

drop.io – mikeswaverobot@appspot.com – Creates a drop and puts the info into the wave whenever the robot is added as a participant.

PlonieBot – ploniebot@appspot.com – Brings wave document editing capabilities to the Plone CMS

Poppy – poppywave@appspot.com – Helps bridge Google Wave conversations to email users outside the Wave.

Starify – starifybot@appspot.com – Lets you star waves, in sort of bookmarking style.

Twiliobot – twiliobot@appspot.com – Transforms phone numbers into click-to-call links. If user clicks a link, a call is placed to his phone and to the number in the link. The call can be transcribed and inserted into the wave as text with a link to the audio.

Wave Live Messenger – wavelivemessenger@appspot.com – Allows you to chat to your windows live messenger contacts from inside a wave.

Rosy Etta – rosy@wavesandbox.com – Translator (40 Languages).

Aunt Rosie – aunt-rosie@appspot.com – Translator bot

Dr Maps – dr-maps@appspot.com – Updates a wave by inserting a map associated to an address.

Dr Weather – shiny-sky@appspot.com – Gives the weather for a City

Embedded Search Results – wave-sandbox@appspot.com – Web and Image searches inline.

FML Blipper – fmlblipper@appspot.com – displays random FML story from www.fmylife.com

Grauniady – grauniady@appspot.com – Searches the latest items from The Guardian for a given phrase.

Stocky – stocky-wave@appspot.com – Detects stock symbols from a wave and updates it with the live stock price.

Wavethingy – wavethingy@appspot.com – Searches Amazon for DVDs and books, and gives the author a cut of any purchases made off the links.

Glossy eCommerce icons

Shopping Cart Icons

css Globe Icons

Shopping Basket Icon

Milky – A ‘green’ themed vector set.

Credit Card Logos

Credit Card 3D Icon Set

Chalkwork Payments

Weby Icon Set

e-Shop Icons

Sienna Icons