I like to travel, so sometimes on the road programming can be a chore without my large monitor. There is a useful solution and that is to use an iPad as an external monitor. It actually works quite well!  What’s nice too is you can use the tablet for most of your normal tasks, and bust out the laptop/tablet combo when you need more real estate (and are compiling things).

If your not familiar with tor, check out https://www.torproject.org/ to get more information. Its a secure proxy system that basically anonymizes your ip address.

You can install the Tor client and connect or a super easy way is to run your own proxy and just have traffic flow through it. Don’t have to start up anything, its always running if you want to use it.

The Beaglebone black is a perfect device to run a Tor proxy on your home network. Once its setup, you can leave it plugged in via ethernet, a USB power supply and its always available. It makes a decent Ubuntu Linux server for development purposes too (although it compiles a little slow).  For a temporary website or learning a programming language its a great deal. We will also have a shortcut on your desktop that you can click on to make chrome go into incognito mode, and connect to our proxy with just one click.

I have always been on the lookout for a nice Bluetooth headset, and a new contender is the LG HBS-730. It is one of the newer style devices that sits on your neck and has ear-buds with wires. It allows you to make phone calls, and is mainly a set of wireless headphones. This means you can listen to music or podcasts all day, and make phone calls with it. So far I have been very impressed, the sound quality is great and phone calls sound just fine (I don’t make all that many these days but the ones I do are great).