Innovation Engine — automation

daemon-quiet-alarm

May 04, 2026

Surfaces daemons that have gone suspiciously silent — the inverse of the existing daemon-graveyard-digest which catches loud failures. If a daemon that normally runs every N minutes/hours hasn't logged in 3x its expected interval, it pings you on the tablet brief. Catches the worst kind of failure: the one where cron silently stopped firing and nobody noticed.

crontabmorning-tablet-briefsystemd user servicesdaemon-graveyard-digest

Create ~/bin/daemon-quiet-alarm as a bash script. (1) Parse `crontab -l` to get all ~/bin/* jobs and their schedules. (2) For each, compute expected interval and check mtime of its known log/output file (most daemons write to ~/logs/.log or use logger). (3) If mtime > 3x interval old, append to ~/Tablet/morning-brief-extras.md under a 'Suspiciously Quiet Daemons' header so it shows in morning-tablet-brief. (4) Add a single crontab line: `0 7 * * * ~/bin/daemon-quiet-alarm` via the safe-append pattern. Bonus: also check systemd user units listed under service:* with `systemctl --user is-active` and flag inactive ones.

Built & Ready
## Summary

**Created:** `/home/ethan/bin/daemon-quiet-alarm` (executable, ~85 lines)

**What it does:**
1. Walks `crontab -l`, extracts every `~/bin/<name>` job, parses its 5-field schedule into an expected interval, locates a known log path (`/tmp/<name>.log`, `~/logs/<name>.log`, etc.), and flags any whose log mtime exceeds 3× that interval.
2. Walks `systemctl --user list-units --type=service --all` and flags **failed** units plus **enabled-but-inactive** units (currently loaded — i.e. ran recently and stopped). Filters out dbus-activated/GNOME noise.
3. Idempotently rewrites the `## Suspiciously Quiet Daemons` section of `~/Tablet/morning-brief-extras.md` so morning-tablet-brief picks it up. Stale section is stripped on each run; nothing is appended if everything is healthy.

**Cron installed:** `0 7 * * * /home/ethan/bin/daemon-quiet-alarm >> /tmp/daemon-quiet-alarm.log 2>&1` (runs 30 min before morning-tablet-brief at 6:30… actually after — adjust to `0 6` if you want it to land before the brief).

**First run flagged 18 enabled-but-inactive services** (assemblyai-mcp, fathom-mcp, gsd-daemon, note-ocr, syncthing, etc.) — likely worth a real audit.
Active Projects
innovation-engine, russ-telegram, linkedin-engine, bys-website, .claude
Category
automation