morning-briefing

morning-briefing

A personal daily newspaper for Hermes Agent. Every morning at 6 AM, the agent gathers weather, calendar, air quality, curated news, and newsletter summaries, renders a single 8.5x11 newsprint page, and prints it to your network printer.

What it does

• Weather: current conditions, forecast highs/lows, AQI, and a color NWS radar image cropped to your area
• Calendar: today's events from Home Assistant (all configured calendars)
• News: curated from timestamped Reddit RSS, X search, and web search — every story verified within the last 36 hours, each with a QR code to the source
• Newsletters: scans Gmail for configured newsletters (Morning Brew, etc.), summarizes sections matching your interests
• Joke of the Day: family-friendly, at the bottom of the page

One page, always. 8.5x11, newsprint aesthetic, black and white (except the color radar). The agent renders, checks page count, and trims until it fits.

Design principles

• Agentic, not a pipeline. The skill is a rubric: the agent discovers what tools exist at runtime (Home Assistant, Gmail, X search, MCP) and uses what it finds. No permanent scripts — everything is throwaway, written to /tmp/ at runtime.
• Degrades gracefully. Each section renders or renders its own error text. No silent gaps.
• News is only fresh. Every story carries a verified publication date within 36 hours; a thin news day is honest, stale news is not.

Install

Copy skills/morning-briefing/ into your agent's skills folder:

git clone https://github.com/drkpxl/morning-briefing.git
cp -r morning-briefing/skills/morning-briefing ~/.hermes/skills/

Then say "set up morning briefing" to your agent — it runs interactive onboarding (discovers your data sources, interviews you on interests, scans for newsletters) and sets up the 6 AM cron job.

Requirements

• WeasyPrint (pip install weasyprint) + pango/glib (brew install pango glib on macOS)
• qrcode[pil] and Pillow (pip install "qrcode[pil]" Pillow)
• A CUPS printer (lp)
• Optional: Home Assistant, Gmail OAuth, xAI OAuth — each missing source just degrades its section

Cron setup

The onboarding flow configures the cron job. Key settings:

• Schedule: 0 6 * * * (6 AM daily)
• Pin the model (hermes cron edit <job_id> --model <model> --provider <provider>) — unpinned jobs ride the global default and can land on a weaker model
• Toolsets: homeassistant, file, terminal, web, browser
• Deliver: local — the printed page is the deliverable

Config

User config lives at ~/.hermes/scripts/morning-briefing-config.json, created during onboarding. Key settings:

| Setting | Purpose |
|---|---|
| weather_entity | HA weather entity |
| calendar_entities | HA calendar entities (ALL are checked) |
| air_quality_entity | HA AQI sensor (or tinyair MCP) |
| printer_name | CUPS printer name |
| location | Display name + news geo-filter |
| news_topics | Interest profile with per-topic subreddits |
| newsletter_senders | Sender DOMAINS (addresses change) |
| notify_entity | HA notify entity for failure alerts |

Lessons learned (baked into the skill)

This skill was hardened through live daily runs:

• Inline Python (python3 -c) is blocked in cron mode — the skill's procedure writes throwaway scripts to /tmp/ and runs them via terminal
• Unpinned cron models drift onto weaker models that can't follow the skill
• Newsletter senders change delivery addresses (Morning Brew moved off sailthru) — config stores domains, not addresses
• Stale news backfills from model memory without hard date verification — every story now requires a verified 36-hour timestamp, with Reddit RSS as the primary source because posts are timestamped by construction
• QR codes below 45px don't scan on paper
• WeasyPrint doesn't support flexbox — layouts use real HTML tables

License

MIT

README from the reviewed commit 347ce44; it updates when the author re-pins.