I've seen a couple of really good tutorials on the proper use of UNIX power tools recently that I wanted to bring to the attention of Operation Gadget readers:

• Mastering Wget from Lifehacker.com: "... A versatile, old school Unix program called Wget is a highly hackable, handy little tool that can take care of all your downloading needs. Whether you want to mirror an entire web site, automatically download music or movies from a set of favorite weblogs, or transfer huge files painlessly on a slow or intermittent network connection, Wget’s for you...."
• How-To: SSH tunnels for secure network access from Engagdet: "Have you ever avoided checking your email over that free wireless access point for fear of someone snarfing your password? Secure, trusted networks aren't always available, so today we'll show you how to use SSH to keep those unencrypted POP3 or IMAP passwords and data safe."

SSH is installed and ready-to-run on every Apple Macintosh that runs Mac OS X. The article on SSH even shows you use a third-party utility called SSH Tunnel Manager as a front end. I thought Wget was part of MacOS X, but, it appears that Wget is a third party utility and is available for Mac OS X here.

Windows PC users have slightly different options. They can either download PuTTY and use it to create a tunnel, or you can download Cygwin which contains both Wget and OpenSSH.