Latelly I've been in the middle of nowhere and my only option is to use my 3G/LTE dongle or tether my phone. The problem is the number of background tasks and updates and everything that consumes my bandwidth. So, I was thinking if there's a way to prevent that. One idea that came to me is to setup some kind of proxy/local routing server that I could configure in the apps I really need to use, like the browser. For the sake of the other apps, I'd seem to be offline.
I'd not like to consider killing the background tasks and/or stopping the auto-updates, because this would be tedious to do every time I needed it.
Is anything like this possible? What are the other alternatives?
EDIT: I'm using xubuntu (xfce powered version of ubuntu)