1. The StackOverflow discussion What's ssh port forwarding and what's the difference between ssh local and remote port forwarding [duplicate] has a good visual comparison/explanation of the difference between the ssh -L (-L stands for local) and ssh -R (-R stands for remote).

2. sshtunnel is a Python implementation of SSH …

There are multiple tools available to convert a Socks proxy to a HTTP/HTTPS proxy. The work by convertting HTTP requests into socks requests and send them to the socks proxy. Be aware that this might not be necessary as many tools accepting HTTP/HTTPS proxies also accept socks proxies …