Feature – Old Time Radio, Part 2 – Night Watch

November 13th, 2011

I claim to have seen every episode of 24 seasons of COPS. This probably isn’t true, but I have seen a lot of them and watch it every chance I get when it’s on TV which, if you haven’t noticed, is almost all day and night when you have cable.

I’ve also had many long conversations with friends who also love COPS about what makes it so great. One of the aspects of COPS that seems unique from other shows is that, following the standard monolog from the cop being featured at the beginning of the segment, any knowledge of what has happened is completely contained in the segment you’re watching. This is to say that we usually know exactly as much as the cop does about what’s happening. This puts the viewer in a unique position of feeling like they are investigating the situation along with the cop. The cinema vérité style dominates COPS. There is no omniscient narrator; there is no knowledge outside of sensory experience.

The other thing we all love about COPS is how each of the three seven-minute segments forms a perfect morality play. There is the rising action of investigation, the climax of arrest or intervention, and the falling action of reporting the action to other officers or taking the perp to jail for processing. It is always clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys will be. Sometimes the cops will proselytize the perps which, while I personally disagree with, can make for entertaining TV. The segments are usually bookended by the featured cop offering pithy comments about the case or him/herself. This makes every episode of COPS both predictable and entirely unique at the same time. I can’t think of another show on TV that can make such a claim.

So imagine my surprise when I was listening to my beloved police stories on Antioch and heard a radio show that closely followed the model of COPS…made in 1954. I had discovered Night Watch, an Old Time Radio program unlike anything else I’ve ever heard on radio before or since.

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Feature – Old Time Radio, Part 1 – Antioch 1710 AM

November 12th, 2011

Radio as a medium fascinates me. The majority of my day, I’m listening to radio in one form or another for one reason or another. At work, I like listening to NPR news and talk on KNAU, a holdover from when I studied in Flagstaff, AZ. The great thing about radio is that it’s a passive medium, even more passive than television. I can actively listen when I’m taking a break and then let it be background noise when I’m trying to get work done. I’ve been working with the radio on for so many years now that I feel odd if I’m not hearing it.

I love radio so much that, about a year ago, I bought a shortwave radio off of Craigslist for $100 while living in Tucson. It was a great investment. From the southwestern United States, I can pick up stations as far east as Florida and Cuba and as far west as China and Australia. I get news, music, and educational programming. I get propaganda from Beijing and the latest local politics from Perth. It opens the world to me in a way that even the Internet doesn’t, and my only gripe is that I can’t pick up the stations I listen to until about 8 PM every night.

But the thing I love the most about radio is what it represents in the history of technology. It’s a technology past its prime, yet still ubiquitous in our daily lives. It’s a paradox of sorts; listening to it makes me nostalgic for a time I never lived through. I often imagine my family crowded around an old AM radio in a wooden hutch, listening to the local news or another episode of Gunsmoke. Radio makes me feel like I’m transported to a different time, a very specific period in history that only existed for a few short decades in the 20th century when radio was everywhere and everything.

And when I’m feeling particularly nostalgic about radio listening, I turn to a very specific subset of radio programming: Old Time Radio (OTR). OTR is radio taking place from the “early 1920s until television’s replacement of radio as the primary home entertainment medium in the 1950s.” It’s hard to pin a certain genre as specific to OTR since radio encompassed so many different things in that time period. A station might play a western drama, a game show, a variety hour, and a radio play based on classic literature in its primetime lineup. The thing about listening to OTR is how quickly you realize that radio was the supreme medium in those days. Trying to imagine what times were like then, it seems from listening now as if literally everyone was engaged in it for almost all of their media consumption.

One of the things I’m most thankful for now is the convergence of the Internet and OTR. Many OTR programs are now available for free for download or rebroadcast by being in the public domain, and a huge collection of old shows are available from Archive.org. The simultaneous rise in Internet radio has also bred stations with a focus on OTR. Some stations focus on one specific genre or show like horror or Dragnet; some stations present a variety of OTR programming on a daily schedule, attempting to closely emulate the past’s radio listening experience for current listeners. Either way, the combination of free rights to rebroadcasting and the growth of Internet radio stations has created a veritable silver age of OTR in the early 21st century.

Today and tomorrow, I’ll be taking a look at one of my favorite OTR stations, Antioch 1710 AM, and one of my favorite OTR programs, Night Watch.

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Google Talk Status to Twitter

November 8th, 2011

In case you’re just here for the script and aren’t interested in reading the story of how this project came to be, click here.

The Story

I have a friend who doesn’t use social networks, but he updates his Google Talk status prolifically. Recently, we joked about it being his microblogging. Then I started to ask myself if there was a way this microblogging could be broadcasted to other outlets. My first thought was of Twitter specifically, so I set off on a Google Search of how to make this work.

Not surprisingly, other people have wanted to do this same thing. The first stop was at Coactlab to check out their service. Coactlab pings a service called Jabberland for your Google Talk status and then relays that information back to Twitter. However, there were two big problems with this. The first problem is that the script for download on the site uses a defunct method of authenticating for Twitter (Twitter has moved to OAuth instead of just a username/password combination). The second problem, even bigger than OAuth, was that Jabberland doesn’t appear to work anymore. So after an hour or so of playing on the site and realizing that things weren’t going to work with a Jabberland script, I moved on to see what else I could find.

And I found a couple interesting leads in the comments of Coactlab’s post. The first lead was written by Jon Deutsch who noted that something called a Google Talk chatback badge existed and broadcasted your Google Talk status in HTML. The second lead was a link to Dan’s Horrendous Waste of Bandwidth. On this site, Dan Ray created a service that, as he describes it, has “taken (Coactlab’s) code and hacked it into a multi-user database-backed web service that anyone can sign up for.” This seemed like a great idea, so I went to Dan’s site and registered for the service. After a short round of testing though, I realized something wasn’t working anymore and suspected his program was pinging the now-defunct Jabberland for a user’s status.

I sent an email to Dan and he was nice enough to share his script with me. Indeed, it was looking for a chat status at Jabberland and still used the old authentication method, but the code got me off to a good start on writing an alternative. This project is deeply indebted to him, his script, and his many replies to my inane questions about PHP, scripting, and authenticating.

In the span of 72 hours, I came up with something that pings your Google Talk chatback badge (intended to be embedded on websites so visitor can chat with you over Gtalk) for your status and then returns that status to your Twitter account. The script is updated for current OAuth authentication on Twitter and should work with any login for an active user. I got the OAuth and OAuth for Twitter scripts from Abraham Williams‘s github page. They made my first entry into PHP/OAuth programming quite painless, and I recommend using them for anyone working on this project.

This project is ugly at best right now. It also shows how little PHP I was able to learn in 72 hours, although it does work in my own limited tests. I’m posting it in hopes of helping others out with posting Google Talk statuses to Twitter. I am also hoping some users can clear up bugs and code along the way and let me know what they’ve changed so I can make updates to this post. Let me know in the comments either way.

The Script

Click here to download the files necessary. Included in the .zip file here is the PHP script for broadcasting a Google Talk status to Twitter as well as the two necessary OAuth PHP files. To use these, you will first have to make a few modifications to the gtalk2twitter.php script:

  1. Go to the Twitter dev site and register your application. You’ll need a name, description, and URL to start.
  2. Once you’re on your application’s webpage, go to Settings and make sure to change your Application Type from “Read only” to “Read and write.” Click Update and return to your Details page.
  3. Copy your consumer key and consumer secret. We’ll need these in a couple of steps.
  4. Click the button “Create my access token.” Copy the access token and access token secret.
  5. Enter your consumer key, consumer secret, OAuth/access token, and OAuth/access token secret in the designated places.
  6. Get the URL for your Google Talk chatback badge. You can get your badge by signing into your Google account and clicking here. Once on the Google Talk chatback badge page, click on edit and make sure to check the “show your status” box. If you don’t, this script won’t work.
  7. Now copy the chatback URL in the box at the bottom of the page. Copy everything inside the quotation marks, from http to h=60. Once you’ve done this, enter the URL in the designated place in the script.
  8. Finally, make note of the name used in your chatback badge on the chatback page. You will see what name is being used for you in the sample badge with the text “Chat with YourName.” Copy YourName exactly as it shows in the badge and paste it into the designated place in the script.
You’re done editing the script! Now place the script in the same folder as OAuth.php and twitteroauth.php (or modify it accordingly) and run it with cron, launchd, or some similar service every 5 minutes or so. The script won’t post the statuses “Available,” “Offline,” “Busy,” or “Away,” but the hack for this is ugly and could stand to be re-written because it will also remove those words if they’re used in a status saying something else.

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