Many people don’t want to miss anything in their IRC room, so they “idle” or just leave the client open to capture all the conversations. It can be annoying to have it going in the background on your computer though. To remedy this, [Harrison] built a simple computer from a propeller microcontroller that’s only purpose is to connect to IRC servers. It can take a regular PS2 keyboard and works with a standard monitor at 1024×768. It’s compact size and low power requirements make it quite a useful tool to have around if you are always on IRC. you can download the source code and schematics on the site.

[Thanks Scott]

tircd is an ircd proxy for talking to the Twitter API. It should work with any standard IRC client. After running the Perl script, you authenticate to the IRC server using your Twitter username as your /nick. Join the room #twitter and the /topic will be set to your last update. Any message you type will update Twitter and the room’s topic. All of the people you are following show up in the room as users and post messages as they tweet. If you private message one of them, it will become a direct message on Twitter. Other commands work too: /whois to get a person’s bio, /invite to start following, and /kick to unfollow. The project is brand new and will be added new features in the future like Search API support. Follow @tircd for updates.