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I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone

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Re: I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone

#81

Post by theshrike79 »

raddan wrote: post #46
theshrike79 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built a RSS feed hydrator just for this. It grabs the basic feed and adds whatever I need to it. Then it generates a new one that I subscribe to on my feed reader.

Have you made this open source? I really want something like this. Bonus points if it lets me add filters, etc. I want to read my local newspaper, but like half of the stories are about high school sports, of which I have absolutely zero interest.

It's 110% vibe engineered, so I'm rather hesitant to share it to anyone else - I don't need the drama =)

But it's pretty much a bespoke handler for every site with some common bits (caching, feed fetching etc)

For example: the HN handler uses the Algolia API to grab "front page" articles, filters them by score and comment count, grabs the link and gets any opengraph data from the link. Then the feed item contains some context for the linked site + post score + comment count.

This way I can make the decision whether to open it or hit next right in my RSS reader.

I have similar handlers for lobsters, tildes, youtube etc. along with a "meh" attempt of a daily AI generated summary for noisy sites like Verge, Ars Technica etc. who publish a dozen or more articles per day. The system grabs all those, combines the ones about the same subject and summarises the content.

But yea, it's open source. 99% of the stuff I build is public on my Github with a permissive license.

Re: I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone

#82

Post by theshrike79 »

neo1 wrote: post #74
raddan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you made this open source? I really want something like this. Bonus points if it lets me add filters, etc. I want to read my local newspaper, but like half of the stories are about high school sports, of which I have absolutely zero interest.

It's called w3m (or lynx). No seriously. Not kidding. While I'm trying to be snarky, I recently discovered how well it works to do exactly what you are asking. Sites that need javascript, or are paranoid cloudflare prisons won't work, but otherwise it works quite well. For walls of text (long substack articles) I still prefer epub, and use https://codeberg.org/neo1/mkebook which I wrote, but if you love the terminal:…

Defuddle (https://github.com/kepano/defuddle) by @kepano (CEO of Obsidian) is pretty damn good at getting a text-only version of random sites.

Re: I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone

#83

Post by jordanscales »

I love my Xteink, it's such an intentional way of consuming content. I have a similar setup to OP. Here's my codex automation:

> Find three diverse, substantive Hacker News articles submitted within the previous 24 hours. Prefer readable linked articles rather than discussion-only, video, paywalled, or repository pages. For each selection, extract a clean UTF-8 XHTML-compatible article fragment and use dotepub's API to create an EPUB under public/books/ with a descriptive `Title - Author.epub` filename. Fix any EPUB 2 packaging or markup problems, including an invalid `xml:lang` on the OPF package element, and require every file to pass `epubcheck` with no errors before upload. Avoid duplicates already present locally or in the production OPDS catalog. Upload only the three newly created EPUB files to `hetzner:/opt/opds/public/books/`; never sync or delete the whole directory. Then verify production `/up` returns 200, unauthenticated `/opds.xml` returns 401, authenticated `/opds.xml` returns 200 and includes all three titles, each download returns `Content-Type: application/epub+zip`, and deployed copies pass `epubcheck`. Report the selected article titles and URLs, filenames, and verification results. Follow the repository AGENTS.md instructions and keep production credentials secret.

Re: I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone

#84

Post by mateioo7 »

timurlenk wrote: post #71
mateioo7 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do support however OPDS libraries and I happily use it for news where each file is a daily epub consisting of the articles I subscribe to

Would you be kind to explain what is your exact workflow? I'm unable to find a software or service that would to this for me, but it's the exact thing I want.

My pleasure. I'm also unaware of a software or service since it seems a bit of a too specific usecase.

I'm doing all this (with no cost) using an AWS Lambda function written in Java which is scheduled to be called daily at 7 am. It basically parses some RSS feeds[1] (or parses html[2] when RSS is non-existent), extracts each article content using readability and packages them all in a daily epub[3] (with a TOC) which is stored in a S3 folder. Then a separate endpoint (the one I use in my X4) is taking most recent N S3 objects from that S3 folder and exposes the OPDS. The only downside of this is that the response time takes about 3 extra seconds since it uses a cold start, but response speed is not important to me.

Using 'OPDS as a news library' works incredibly well with my X4, it takes me under 10 seconds to download and open the epub and should work with any e-ink device that can install KOReader (or any other software with OPDS support). And I love that all articles are inside a single epub and I can easily go to another one from the TOC.

It's probably my most useful personal project and I like that by now it follows the 'set it and forget it' principle but in need, since it's written by hand, it's very easy to customize it: filter out AI/war/finance/local-gibberish/whatever articles, add new 'bridges' to websites without RSS, some articles don't respect html guidelines and need some tinkering, etc.

[1] https://github.com/rometools/rome

[2] https://github.com/jhy/jsoup

[3] https://github.com/psiegman/epublib

Re: I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone

#85

Post by jordanscales »

jeromechoo wrote: post #17

I have an X4 as well and tried going down this path but it's just a bit too much friction for me to set my X4 to hotspot mode and run the calibre sync every time I want to refresh my feed. Absolutely love the idea though. Just wish Crosspoint/X4 had the ability to schedule push/pull, but that would likely burn through the battery.

Have you tried OPDS instead? There's a link to it on the Crosspoint homescreen. Connects to your latest access point so no hotspot mode.

Re: I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone

#86

Post by rcarmo »

I’ve got an X4 as well, and https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/bun-readlater-epub/ and https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/bun-opds-server/ were created for it.

I have also added an e-ink theme to https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/picoflux/ so I can use the browser on my Nomad instead of my iPad, for those trips where I want to read “live” news but not be suckered in by it (and picoflux is how I deal with title-only feeds as well)

Re: I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone

#87

Post by rcarmo »

dewey wrote: post #11

In my regular RSS reader I often have the problem that some feeds are not full feeds, or some images are missing (In case they have some gallery) and I have to click out to the page, even just to verify I got the full text. That always kinda stops me from going the eink route where I don’t have a proper browser. Depends on which feeds you subscribe to I guess, probably works really well for long form, reliable feeds.

https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/picoflux/ fixes that for me.

Re: I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone

#88

Post by ilamont »

ericd wrote: post #64
ilamont wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I realized somewhere in the middle of the caffeine and sugar rush, just what a huge effort it takes to put out a DAILY newspaper. It's incredible, even without considering the cheap price. Former newspaper editor here. We took it for granted at the time, but the orchestration of different teams on a daily basis, with all kinds of cascading workflows and triggers, was something to behold. Editorial, design, special…

This came up recently on HN, I thought it was an amazing watch: https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe... I couldn't imagine the stress to hit deadline. And the insanity of making a whole set of new metal rollers every single day. It all really drove home just how much work went into making the paper happen.

Interesting that nearly every single operator in that video is a middle-aged or older guy. Possibly because it was a union and those jobs were rock steady for decades, with very low turnover.

There are linotype machines in museums, and sometimes they fire them up for demonstrations. There are very few printers left who actually know how to use them, the operator I saw was 90 years old!

Re: I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone

#89

Post by janandonly »

My wife bought a large PocketBook (almost A4 size screen) e-reader and just last night I discovered it has a built in RSS reader.

No function to import or export OPML, unfortunately.

But adding a few high value feeds would be worth our time I guess.

Re: I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone

#90

Post by iacutone »

penchant wrote: post #77

I did this for a while when I was learning Spanish! I used Calibre's CLI on my Raspi which generated the epubs from RSS feeds I'd chosen (Spanish-language media like El País, ABC — I speak in the Peninsular variety) and sent it to my Kindle via e-mail. It did this every morning. Can't stress how much this has helped me with the language. Unfortunately, my Rapsi died some months ago and I haven't gotten around to some…

You can modify my code here a bit and run everything in GitHub actions: https://github.com/iacutone/elpais_rss/
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