too mainstream (RIP brick)

I destroyed my openbrick computer today by plugging a laptop's power supply into it. Too many volts went into my poor little server, and though I did appreciate the way some unknown hardware hacker made the system buzz in morse code in this case, it was too late to save it.

I'll try to fix it later, but today I had a house to wire(less), and so I ended up buying an off the shelf wireless router. I've never configured one before; my home wireless has always been limited exclusively to linux access points. In many ways it's impressive everything this little box can do, and how slick it is, until one runs up against its shortcomings. Like not being able to assign hostnames to clients in the dns server. And not being able to check a plain text config file into svn. Everything so far has been worked around, but I have the same queasy feeling I got the last time I walked into a McDonalds and ate a Big Mac.