Brad, I personally use a putty SSH tunnel on my laptop-with-wifi, but that is an application level tunnel - you can only encrypt/tunnel one TCP port per tunnel, so I just use it to access my web proxy... everything loaded by my browser is encrypted.
I'm sure there's some sort of VPN solution which would be able to encrypt everything seamlessly, with a couple of 'nix boxes at each end quietly doing their thing. I looked into VPNs a while ago but gave up because the SSH solution - in my specific case - was easier.
