Breaklist - A morning report generator for thermal printers

Breaklist is a toolkit that generates personalized morning reports, designed for thermal printers. The compact summary provides you with all your to-dos, reminders, weather forecast, and the hottest Hacker News highlights fitting snuggly on a dainty, receipt-like paper.

The morning report currently includes:

• A task list
• Reminders
• Weather forecast
• Summary of latest top articles on Hacker News

There's also a friendly web app to help with managing tasks hassle-free.

Web App Visuals

Complete Report Example

Features

• Tasks are stored in a tasks.list file in plain text format
• A web app provides an interface for managing tasks
• Reminders are stored in a reminders.list file using crontab format
• The weather forecast is retrieved from Tomorrow.io's API (requires API key)
• Hacker News summaries are powered by polyrabbit's hacker-news-digest
• The morning report is generated as a PDF using wkhtmltopdf

Getting started

Prerequisites

• wkhtmltopdf needs to be installed. It can be downloaded from here.
• A Tomorrow.io API key

Installation

To use Breaklist, you can either download the latest release from the GitHub releases page or build it from source:

Downloding latest release

Building from source

git clone [email protected]:alibahmanyar/breaklist.git
cd breaklist
make setup
make

The compiled binaries will be available in the build directory.

Usage

Before running Breaklist, duplicate the .env.example file and rename it to .env, then populate the variables accordingly.

Once the variables are set, Breaklist can be operated using the following commands:

• The reportGenerator executable will generate the report as breaklist.pdf which can be printed using a thermal printer.

• The webserver executable will run the web application to manage the tasks. The web app will be available at :3030.

Weather Forecast

The weather forecast includes temperature, "RealFeel," and an icon indicating the weather condition.

tasks.list and reminders.list

The tasks.list file contains the list of current tasks in plain text format, with each task on a separate line.

The reminders.list file holds the reminders in a crontab-style format, with each reminder on a separate line. Example:

#.---------- day of month (1 - 31)
#|  .------- month (1 - 12) OR jan,feb,mar,apr ...
#|  |  .---- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0 or 7) OR sun,mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat
#|  |  |

* * *|Reminder 1 (Every day)
*/2 * *|Reminder 2 (Every other day)
* * 6,0|Reminder 2 (On Saturdays and Sundays)