The Daily Times

Your AI writes a one-page newspaper about your day.It prints on any printer you own, when you walk up to it.

Try it · How it works · Connect your AI · Any printer · Self-host · Privacy

Every morning you pick up your phone and get dragged into a dozen feeds. The Daily Times gives you one page instead: today's calendar, the emails that need you, what moved in your field, new papers, jobs, prices and the weather. On paper, waiting at the printer.

• Works without any AI. Sign up, write one sentence about what you're into, and every morning you get an auto edition from public sources, with headlines and numbers quoted exactly as published.

• Better with your AI. Point Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Claude Code or any agent at your private endpoint. It writes a personal edition from what only it can see (your calendar, your inbox, your chats) and sends just the finished page.

• Any printer. 58/80 mm receipt printers, office lasers, inkjets, IPP Everywhere, email-to-print, cheap Bluetooth "cat" printers, or no printer at all (open the PDF).

• Prints when you walk up. A tiny agent on a Raspberry Pi or Mac waits for a motion sensor, a button or a phone tap, then prints once a day.

• Private by design. We never see your calendar or mail. We keep an email, your interests and 30 days of editions. Export or delete everything in one click. Open source, MIT.

How it works

flowchart LR
    subgraph you [" "]
      AI["Your AI<br/>Claude · ChatGPT · Codex<br/>(reads calendar + mail)"]
      You["You<br/>times.flowsxr.com"]
    end
    AI -- "print_brief (MCP)<br/>or webhook / email" --> S
    You -- "interests, printers" --> S
    S["The Daily Times server<br/>editions · 60-day dedup<br/>auto edition from public sources"]
    Pi["Printer agent<br/>Pi · Mac · Linux"] -- "polls" --> S
    Sensor["Motion sensor · button · phone"] --> Pi
    Pi --> P["Any printer<br/>receipt · laser · inkjet · email · PDF"]

1. 06:00: your AI's daily task gathers your day and calls print_brief. If no AI sends anything, the server builds an auto edition from your interests.

2. 07:40: you walk past the printer. The sensor fires, the agent fetches today's edition, renders it for that exact printer, and prints it.

3. It reports back, so it prints once per day per printer, and stories you've already seen don't come back for 60 days.

Related MCP server: PieterPost MCP

Get started

Sign up (one minute)

Go to times.flowsxr.com, enter your email, describe what you're into in a sentence. You'll see today's front page right away and can open it as a PDF.

Connect any AI agent

On Connect AI you get one private URL. It can only add editions to your paper: it can't read anything back, and you can replace it at any time.

# Claude Code
claude mcp add --transport http dailytimes "https://times.flowsxr.com/u/<your-token>/mcp"

• Claude (web/desktop): Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector → paste the URL.

• ChatGPT: Settings → Apps & Connectors → developer mode → Create → paste the URL.

• Codex: [mcp_servers.dailytimes] url = "<URL>" in ~/.codex/config.toml.

• Anything else (n8n, Zapier, cron, a shell script): POST JSON or plain text to the webhook URL.

Then paste the prompt from the page (also in SETUP_PROMPT.md). It sets up a daily task with strict editorial rules: concrete facts only, never invent, one source link per item, short.

Print it

On a Raspberry Pi, Mac or Linux box next to the printer:

pipx install "dailytimes[escpos,mdns] @ git+https://github.com/prasanthsasikumar/dailytimes"
dailytimes setup --server https://times.flowsxr.com --code ABCD-EFGH   # code from the Printers page
dailytimes service    # prints the systemd/launchd file to start it at boot

setup finds your printers (CUPS queues, Bonjour/IPP Everywhere, USB and serial receipt printers), suggests the right paper, prints a test page and writes the config. No sensor? The default trigger is a local URL, so an iOS Shortcut, an NFC tag or a smart button can say "I'm here".

Any printer

The server stores layout blocks, never pixels; each printer renders for its own paper. A new printer type is one adapter class plus one profile file.

dailytimes profiles lists them. Write your own YAML in ~/.config/dailytimes/profiles/:

name: thermal-104mm
type: thermal            # thermal (raster) | page (PDF)
layout: slip             # slip | newspaper
dpi: 203
paper_width_mm: 112
printable_width_px: 832
margins_mm: [4, 2, 6, 2] # top right bottom left
cutter: true
color: false
columns: 1
font_scale: 1.0
fill_page: false         # page profiles: scale type 0.85x-1.3x so the brief fills exactly one page

Every adapter has a dry-run mode (--dry-run, or dry_run: true per output) that does all the encoding (lp command, IPP request, ESC/POS bytes, MIME message) without touching hardware.

Adding a printer type: subclass dailytimes.adapters.Adapter, set name and formats, implement send(job), and either decorate it with @register or expose it in the dailytimes.adapters entry-point group of your own package. Add a profile YAML. Nothing else changes.

Presence: printing when someone walks up

Rules: print once per day, on the first presence after print_after; at most one attempt per cooldown_minutes; if no brief has arrived, retry later (default) or after fallback_after print a placeholder slip / skip the day. The agent reports printed/failed to the relay.

Privacy

The Daily Times is built to know as little as possible:

Auto editions are built server-side from keyless public sources (Google News search, Hacker News, Reddit, arXiv, Yahoo Finance, Open-Meteo, your RSS feeds). Nothing is summarised by an LLM, so nothing can be made up. Full details: PRIVACY.md.

Run your own

Everything above is this repository. Run the whole thing on your laptop, a Pi, a VPS, or Vercel + Supabase:

git clone https://github.com/prasanthsasikumar/dailytimes && cd dailytimes
uv venv && uv pip install -e ".[dev]"
DAILYTIMES_DEV=1 .venv/bin/dailytimes serve        # http://localhost:8787, sign-in link shown on screen

.venv/bin/pytest -q             # 156 tests
./scripts/demo.sh               # server + MCP + webhook + printer agent + presence -> ./out (58mm, 80mm, A4, Letter)
./scripts/test_postgrest.sh     # storage tests against real Postgres + PostgREST (Supabase's stack)

Docker, Vercel + Supabase, email and every setting: DEPLOY.md and .env.example.

FAQ

Do I need a printer? No. The dashboard shows today's edition and opens it as a PDF. Many people start by printing the PDF on whatever they have.

Do I need an AI subscription? No. The auto edition works on its own. Connecting an AI adds the parts only it can see: your calendar, inbox and judgement about what matters.

Which receipt printer should I buy? Any ESC/POS printer works: 80 mm models with a cutter (Epson TM-T20, Xprinter XP-80) feel the most like a newspaper; 58 mm ones are cheaper. Run dailytimes printers to see what's detected.

Can it print at a fixed time instead of on presence? Yes: the simulated presence backend with every_seconds, or a cron job calling dailytimes presence.

Two printers? Pair both. Each prints the day's edition once.

Can my AI invent things? The tool tells it not to, every item carries a source link, and the page shows it. The auto edition can't invent: it only quotes sources.

Developers

The brief format

{
  "title": "Thursday briefing",
  "blocks": [
    {"type": "heading", "text": "Today"},
    {"type": "row", "left": "09:30 Design review", "right": "Room 4"},
    {"type": "heading", "text": "Your field"},
    {"type": "heading", "level": 2, "text": "Lead story headline"},
    {"type": "text", "lead": "Subject", "text": "Two or three sentences.", "url": "https://source.example/story"},
    {"type": "bullet", "lead": "Subject", "text": "One item.", "url": "https://source.example/item"},
    {"type": "divider"},
    {"type": "qr", "url": "https://source.example/story", "caption": "Read more"},
    {"type": "small", "text": "Sources: calendar, arXiv."}
  ]
}

lead (optional, up to 40 characters) prints in bold before the item's text, newspaper style; a colon is added unless it ends in punctuation. Under each linked item only the publisher's domain is printed; the full link goes in a qr block.

Strict validation: unknown fields or types are rejected, URLs must be absolute http(s), there are length limits per block, and at most 80 blocks and 6000 characters. The webhook and email also accept plain text: # Heading, ## Headline, - bullet https://link, left | right, ---, qr: URL caption, small: text, anything else is a paragraph.

API

The endpoint token can only add editions; the printer token can only read today's edition and report its own status. Both are stored hashed.

Send responses include status (queued, duplicate, empty_after_dedup), dropped_duplicates (links already printed in the last 60 days) and superseded.

Code map

src/dailytimes/
  blocks.py            brief schema, strict validation, link canonicalisation, plain-text parser
  relay/               the server: app (API), web (website), store, db (SQLite | Supabase),
                       mcp_server, sessions, mailer, autoedition, inbound email, templates/
  autobrief/           interests, public sources, composer, source suggestion, SSRF-safe fetch
  render/              profiles, bundled fonts (OFL), layout engine, raster + PDF renderers
  adapters/            cups+ipp, escpos, catprinter, email, file, discovery
  agent/               printer agent: config, rules, presence, runner, setup wizard
  cli.py               dailytimes serve|register|send|setup|service|agent|presence|printers|test-print|render|...
api/index.py           Vercel entry point          supabase/schema.sql   database schema (+ RLS)
scripts/               demo.sh, test_postgrest.sh  deploy/               example agent config, unit files

Roadmap

• OAuth for the MCP connector (today the private URL is the credential)

• Publish to PyPI (pipx install dailytimes)

• Bluetooth transport for cat printers (the encoder is done: docs/cat-printers.md)

• E-ink displays as an output (the raster renderer already does any width)

• PWG raster for IPP printers that don't take PDF

• More sources for the auto edition: local events, transit, sports fixtures

Ideas and pull requests welcome: see CONTRIBUTING.md. Design decisions are logged in PROGRESS.md.

License

MIT. Fonts: UnifrakturMaguntia and the PT family, under the SIL Open Font License.