Having a squid proxy server transparently caching your websites can speed up loading of web-pages on the network. However it can be annoying when dealing with Ubuntu (and Debian) repositories, especially if people on the network use different repositories, as it just downloads the same files for each repository.

Apt-cacher-ng is an application that is able to cache the files for Ubuntu and Debian repositories across repositories, so if a file is cached from one server and someone requests the same file from another server, apt-cacher-ng just returns the file from the cache. It also has additional features (like adding pre- downloaded packages to the cache) that save bandwidth and an interface to monitor the bandwidth saved.

I recently got a Virgin Mobile Broadband Modem USB dongle. Researching the dongle looked promising, uncovering people getting it to work on Ubuntu. What was lacking however, was a good tutorial for people to follow to get it to work.