Hacker News Reader

I had the opposite experience with mine; My BeagleBone Black kept becoming soft-bricked while trying to run Debian (unable to boot, forcing me to reinstall the OS/loader or restore a backup), and I eventually found out it was because upstream Debian updates were incompatible with the board's funny hardware. One needs (or at least needed) to take special care not to update one's kernel.

Switched to a RPi2 after that headache. The BBB has been collecting dust ever since.

Possibly too late for you, but if you decide to put the BBB to good use in the future, this is all you need:

http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardDebian

It's also massively more capable on the GPIO front. I used mine for a project with a lot of analog input that a Pi would never have worked for.

I haven't researched the BB in a while. Are there any BLOBs that remain (graphics?). Last time I checked it was the freest alternative I found.