Parker Wahle regulad

Vega OS: what we've learned

Platform facts about Vega OS 2.0, from a Fire TV Stick 4K Select. They come from building RosellaView, an AirPlay receiver for Vega; its protocol findings are in its own docs, such as AIRPLAY.md. These were found by experiment on one device in Developer Mode, not from Amazon documentation, unless a source is given. Dates are when each was established.

Related: RosellaView's AGENTS.md and DECISIONS.md, which several notes below cite by number (D4, D9…).

Device and OS

Fire TV Stick 4K Select, model AFTCA002. MediaTek MT8698, 1 GB RAM.
OS 2.0 (TV Ship/532), Linux 6.1.25-mainline+, armv7l userland (build armv7; the SDK also builds aarch64 and x86_64).

IaC meta-project

Policy declaration

Workstations: dotfiles
Network: tailscale-acls
Homelab: homelab

Tooling

Updating a Dell ST33 TPM's firmware from Linux with fwupd

Notes from a Dell Latitude 7420 (Tiger Lake, discrete STMicro ST33 TPM 2.0) running Bluefin (Fedora 44, fwupd 2.1.8), October 2026. Dell only ships its TPM firmware as a Windows/DOS executable and has never published it to the LVFS, but fwupd can deliver it anyway. This is how, what went wrong on the way, and what we learned about the chip.

Everything below was done on one machine. It worked, but it is unsupported by Dell. You need the AC adapter connected, your LUKS recovery passphrase at hand (a TPM firmware update can clear the chip), and a tolerance for the small chance of a dead TPM.

macOS: SSH over Tailscale hangs when the LAN routes 100.64/10 to a Tailscale router

Symptom

A Mac runs the open-source tailscaled, started at boot by launchd. After a restart it has its Tailscale address, and tailscale ping to it works, but TCP connections to it over Tailscale hang at connect:

$ ssh -v mymac
debug1: Connecting to mymac.tailnet.ts.net [100.101.102.103] port 22.

Mini-Projects

Python

Here is a list of some of my Python Mini-Projects, normally devleoped in a day or less.

Most of them are packages published on pip and can be used in Python projects.

Bewarned, most of them are little more than proofs-of-concept. The ones below are ones that I am proud of, and there are probably more lost in the margins of my GitHub account.

Easy Google TTS Stack Software

Perfect for simple apps like Discord bots.

Based on the work of Gnome!

Google TTS Wrapper: https://github.com/regulad/async-gTTS (async-gTTS)
Easy Google TTS API: https://github.com/regulad/easy-gTTS-API (regulad/easy-gtts-api)
Easy Google TTS Wrapper: https://github.com/regulad/easy-gTTS-py (easy-gTTS)

	# Copyright (c) 2023 by Parker Wahle. All rights reserved.
	# Requires pytest, tweepy, pytest, pytest-selenium, selenium, & tor-python-easy
	# Up a Tor proxy with https://github.com/markowanga/tor-python-easy
	# I used the Chrome driver, but I've written code to use any driver.

	import pytest
	from selenium.webdriver import Proxy
	from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options as ChromeOptions
	from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
	from selenium.webdriver.edge.options import Options as EdgeOptions

	name: CI
	on:
	push:
	branches: [ master ]
	pull_request:
	branches: [ master ]
	workflow_dispatch:
	jobs:
	build:
	strategy:

	import sys
	import importlib
	import importlib.util

	from aiohttp import web


	class SubappLoadingFailure(Exception):
	def __init__(self, *args, subapp_name: str):
	self.subapp_name = subapp_name