Daily Dispatch: a digest and podcast of my links

I send links from my phone all day, and I wanted them back once a day as something I would actually read. Daily Dispatch turns the links you send from your phone during the day into a daily news digest and a two-host podcast episode.^[1] Both land in a small reading app styled after the old Yahoo News Digest, which Yahoo launched in January 2014 and stopped publishing in June 2017.^[1][2][3]

It started as a 5 PM digest for me, and I don’t like building one-offs, so I put the whole thing in one public repo that anyone can run.^[4]

What it does

Every day the same links become three things, starting with a written digest: the daily-digest skill for Claude Code turns the day’s links into a digest page and rebuilds the archive.^[5] The second is a podcast, a “two-host, call-in style podcast episode.”^[6] The third is the app, where the digest, the archive and the episode live.^[1]

How it works

You send links with Pushbullet, whose API lets other programs “build on the Pushbullet infrastructure.”^[7] A Python pipeline captures them and writes the digest.^[1][5] The daily-dispatch command line tool writes the podcast script and voices it.^[6]

The show’s style guide asks for “two hosts, Car Talk-brothers style.”^[12] Car Talk was NPR’s call-in show where two hosts joked their way through people’s car problems.^[13] The same guide says to “Cut the joke rate roughly in half compared to your first draft.”^[12] I tried to hold this post to that rule too.

A daily episode is optional, and when you turn it on, the tool installs a job with systemd, cron, launchd or Windows Task Scheduler, whichever your machine uses.^[14]

New editions and episodes come with a notification: Android and iOS use Expo push, the web uses Web Push, and the desktop app checks for news every 5 minutes.^[15][16][17]

Where it runs

The app runs on Android phones and e-ink tablets, iOS, the web, macOS, Linux and Windows.^[1] The e-ink version is a grayscale build of the same app.^[1][18]

On the desktop it is the same React Native code as the phone app, drawn by react-native-impeller-platform.^[19][20] “There is no Electron and no web view.”^[19] That platform is another of my open-source projects.^[21]

The desktop screenshots come from the repo’s desktop check, a 480x900 window drawn by the engine.^[22]

Quick start

The README’s quick start runs the desktop app on sample editions, writes a podcast script from example stories, and runs the pipeline’s tests, and none of it needs an account or an API key.^[1]

git clone https://github.com/blbaker/daily-dispatch.git
cd daily-dispatch/app
npm run desktop:install
npm run desktop:demo

The podcast tool is on npm as @blbaker/daily-dispatch.^[23] It needs Node.js 22 or newer, plus ffmpeg to make audio.^[6]

How it’s tested

The latest build on main made the Android phone and e-ink apps, an iOS simulator app, the web export and desktop packages for macOS, Windows and Linux.^[24] Its script tests passed 44 of 44.^[24] The podcast package passed 176 tests with one skipped, and its release checks passed 113 of 113.^[25] Before a release, CI publishes the package to a throwaway local registry and runs it by name.^[26]

What’s missing

• iOS is a simulator build for now, since a device build needs an Apple developer account.^[1]
• The macOS desktop app isn’t signed or notarized yet.^[19]
• Without a release key, the Android apps are signed with the public debug key.^[27]
• The Android build used for the push tests was a debug build that never ran on a real phone.^[15]
• A real Web Push to the browser used in testing fails, because Google’s push service answers 410.^[15]

Daily Dispatch is on GitHub at blbaker/daily-dispatch under the MIT license, with docs at blbaker.github.io/daily-dispatch.^[28][29]