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As the good weather takes hold in the northern hemisphere, more and more of us think of hauling the laptop computer out to the park or the back yard to do some billable work in a natural setting. What could be better than tanning while you work? Well, one thing: being able to actually see what you’re doing.

A while back we looked at a whole bunch of ways to generate short URLs, starting with the classic TinyURL. There’s a new alternative for this same task, with more features packed into it than most of the competition: the ponderously-named Short URL Service, which is easier to remember as linkslash.com.

A recent podcast from CNet featured Michael Breus, a psychologist and sleep specialist.   Dr. Breus discussed some common misnomers regarding sleep and its effect on those around us.

Don’t worry: no one is going to send you an invoice for the time you spend using dozens of random web sites to do your work. But a blog post from Ryan Spoon got me wondering: what’s out there that you would pay for if you had to? Ryan says he’d be willing to pony up money for GMail, Mint, Craigslist, and various podcasts, among other things. I know I’d be ready to pull out my credit card for Twitter Prime, with traffic prioritization and advanced filtering and grouping features.

Online workspace and collaboration site Sosius (who we looked at a few weeks ago), has officially launched. Though they’re open for business now, you can still get a free account under the same terms as during the beta: 200MB storage for your file repository, calendars, tasks, chat, discussion boards, and other “social” features.

We prefer not to look back on the mistakes of the past, especially if they’re ours. It doesn’t matter where we are in our careers right now, but there’s bound to be at least one project that makes us cringe or feel embarrassed whenever we remember it.

While the majority of web workers are Windows- and Mac-based, there are a lot of good, free ways to open up to the rich world of Linux applications, too. Some people go to the trouble of using virtualization tools to run Linux locally on the same machine they have their primary operating systems on. You don’t have to go to these lengths, though. In this post, I’ll cover ways to get into using Linux and applications for it running from nothing more than a CD or USB key.

Some of us have a real addiction to buying domain names. I own about 30 myself, and I have friends with many more. If you’re in that boat, it’s worth knowing about a couple of tools that help you find open domain names quickly.

Gasoline approaching $4 per gallon in the USA. Airlines and the TSA putting new limits on carry-on luggage. Baggage-handling disasters. Concerns over the environmental impact of airplanes. It seems as if every day there’s a new reason out there not to travel - and that’s not even counting the efficiency benefits of a schedule without travel time.

In a bid to prove how robust and versatile Skype is, the company has embarked on a unique experiment that has a writer using Skype-enabled gadgets to stay in touch with the office, update her blog and keep in touch with friends and followers while traveling across 15 countries. The catch is that she has to remain in perpetual motion for the entire 33-day journey - even while she’s sleeping and eating!

Firefox is not the only browser with a new beta release out there. Opera 9.5 is the latest release from the fourth browser maker, and it’s second beta version - just released - is a full-featured browser with a lot to offer. Besides the new Dragonfly developer tools and the Opera Link synchronization technology, it’s also got a batch of other improvements.

Every once in a while, I come across a site that just rocks my world. This week, I found two - Addictomatic.com, a search aggregator with a nifty interface (Mike G. reviewed it) and Spinscape, a site I learned about through a comment on my previous posts about mind mapping. After a flurry of emails to get past the closed beta gates, I was in and mapping away in no time.

The more velocity there is in your working life, the more meetings you attend, or rather suffer through.

MyCommittee can’t promise to turn off the spigot on your whinging co board members, but it does hold out the promise that you can plan, structure and organize face-to-face meetings that actually produce results.

If you’re involved with development, design or application delivery on the web, it makes increasing sense to look into free open source tools that can help you. Over on OStatic, the GigaOm blog on open source that I edit, we’ve recently covered many of these. In this post, I’ll provide some examples of what you can find there and what these tools can do for you.

There are many online project management offerings on the web including Projjex (previously covered), Basecamp, and Zoho Project.

For some answers to that question, you can turn to the relatively new site Where We Do What We Do. Here you’ll find thumbnails and pictures of about five dozen (at the moment) workspaces, heavily skewed towards home offices. You can also submit your own photos, or, if you’re completely obsessed, subscribe to their RSS feed. Lots of these spaces are pretty cool, though not many folks have as much clutter as I do.

There’s certainly no shortage of places online to store your files these days. Indeed, sometimes it seems hard to find a web 2.0 site that doesn’t allow you to upload files. Whether it’s attachments in GMail, files in Basecamp, or pure online storage at sites like Xdrive or Box.net, moving your files to the web is as simple as deciding where you want to put them.

I’ve heard it said that a lot of relationships don’t survive grad school because it can be so intense. I imagine the same could be said for startups and other major projects. There’s been a lot written about startup challenges, but I haven’t seen much discussion about what a startup, or any large-scale, long-term project can do to your relationship when you’re self-employed.

I have a confession: even though I have a del.icio.us account with hundreds of bookmarks saved in it, I almost never look at it. That’s because the relentlessly textual presentation just doesn’t click with me. A new OS X del.icio.us client, Delish (now in beta, for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard only), just might change that for me. The key here is that it presents all of your links, tags, and bundles with graphical thumbnails, rather than as just another list. Indeed, the interface is almost exactly that of iPhoto, just transmuted to work with the site instead of with photos.

With travel costs rising each and every day, business are seeking ways to not only save money but be more conscience of the way their business practices are affecting the environment.  Video conferencing is a hot space currently with many options for web workers to choose from.  Being able to see your team on a video screen is vastly superior to a run-of-the-mill conference call.