My server prints me a newspaper every morning

I came across someone who had a script that collates a daily newsletter for her and prints it out. She called it the Karen Times. I liked the idea and wanted to see if I could do the same thing.

I already have a small NUC PC running here at home that hosts this site, and a wifi printer on the same network. So I set it up to print me a one-page newspaper at 6am every day. I called it The Dean Times.

What’s in it

I picked the things I read about most - AI labs, Australian startups and Australian finance. Each one gets a main story on the front page. There are also the markets, a few Hacker News stories, the weather and the stats from this site.

The back page has a longer article, the rest of the day’s stories as one-liners, the week ahead and a sudoku.

I also wanted the page to be useful for something once I’d read it, so it has instructions and fold marks to turn it into a paper plane.

How it works

It’s a script on the NUC that runs at 6am. It pulls the news feeds, the weather from the Bureau of Meteorology, market prices and the site stats, builds the page, turns it into a PDF and sends it to the printer.

The printing was the painful part. The printer wouldn’t take a PDF and Windows wouldn’t print from a scheduled job unless someone was logged in. We got around it by converting each page to an image and sending that straight to the printer.

Nothing extra had to be installed, it all runs on what comes with Windows.

What I changed

The first version had 35 stories on it. Too many articles and not enough information. So I cut it back to one decent story per section, with everything else as a one-liner on the back.

Some sites block scripts or have paywalls, so those only show up as short items for now.

What’s next

I built this with Claude but there’s no AI in the paper itself yet. Next I want to run a small model on the NUC overnight to summarise the articles. I’ll keep changing the sources over time as well.

There’s a short summary on the project page.