Now that BitlBee is running on the BeagleBone, you can enjoy OTR-protected instant messaging, but we can improve the setup. Currently, we are connecting to BitlBee directly from your IRC client. This is fine if you have one client. But, if you are chatting with your laptop and then get up and go, you may want to continue a conversation on your phone. For this, we will need a more persistent proxy connection. The problem can be stated in a more general way: how can we maintain a persistent connection to all of our IRC networks, including BitlBee. For this, we'll need an IRC bouncer.

IRC bouncers act as a proxy server and maintain your connection to an IRC server. This may be useful on servers that don't support nick registration and you want to maintain your nick. As mentioned in the previous use case, bouncers generally support multiple clients which will allow you to have a near seamless IRC conversation as you switch devices. Since we are...