Every morning at 3 a.m., a PHP script wakes up and does something I used to do manually.
It checks the local news feeds — KTVB, KIVITV, Idaho Press, Idaho Capital Sun. It pulls the National Weather Service API for conditions and any active alerts. It checks ITD 511 for road conditions. It hits Ticketmaster for local events. Then it formats everything into a clean email and sends it to me via iCloud SMTP.
By the time I wake up, it's already in my inbox.
Why build this instead of using an app?
There are a dozen apps that claim to do something like this. Most of them want a subscription. A lot of them now want to summarize the news with an AI, which means you're getting a distillation of a distillation, someone else's model deciding what the headline meant and whether it mattered.
I don't want that. I want the actual headlines. I want to know if there's a weather alert or if I-84 is closed before I get in the car. I want events that are actually happening in my area, not "near me," on a platform that thinks "near me" means Portland, Oregon.
The total cost to run this is zero. All the APIs are free tier or public. The scheduler is macOS launchd. no cloud, no cron job on a server I’m paying for, no LLM inference.
The no-AI part is intentional
This came together in early 2025 when I was tired of every tool being rebranded as an AI product. Sometimes you just want a script that fetches RSS feeds, formats them, and sends them. The technology for this has existed for 20 years. I didn't need to make it smarter. I needed to make it mine.
It’s configurable for other regions if you want to adapt it. The repo is on GitHub.