David Brazeal knows how to make AI do his bidding. He live-streams high school football games at RepublicTigerSports.com and he needed an intro (16 seconds).
Told Claude Code I wanted a 1980s-style retro broadcast sports intro to run through the first 18 seconds of the music. Then asked it to grab some of my football photos from my hard drive and have them float across the screen. I did zero manual work on this. Music from Suno.
Apple has issued updates to the iPhone (18.2) and the MacOS (15.2). It’s going to take me six months to explore all of the new features but the Image Playground app seemed like a good place to start. This video provides a good introduction. The app enables non-artists (like me) to create images. You can just describe an image and then tweak until you get what you saw in your head… or you can upload a photo and let the app use that as a starting point. Watch the video above if you’re curious. Below are some early efforts: Steve, David Brazeal, couple of Golden Retrievers, John Robison and Allen Hammock.
RepublicTigerSports.com is the brainchild of David Brazeal, a long time friend and former co-worker. You won’t find a better community sports site. It features “live game broadcasts, highlights and audio interviews, photos, stats, scores and summaries.”
David gets some help with photos when he’s doing live play-by-play but he does all the content and sells all the advertising. It is a very successful website but a huge undertaking for one person.
David and I recently had a text conversation during which he shared how he was using ChatGPT to help manage content on the site. He recently did a post called “Shout Outs for Seniors”:
“I collected nominations in a form. Fed the exported form data to ChatGPT, spent about 15 minutes and it created the HTML bookmarks at the top of the page linking to each nominee, the H4 headline tags, etc. Rather than having to do all that by hand.
I’ve got the writing prompts honed in on Claude (rather than ChatGPT) so it writes pretty close to my style. For baseball games I have started just looking at my box score and recording a voice memo recapping what happens. I upload the audio to Dropbox, ChatGPT watches that folder and transcribes it. I feed the transcription to Claude and get a rough draft of my game recap. If I have quotes, I feed it my quotes and tell it to use them verbatim. Make a few tweaks when I’m finished and it’s ready.
The voice cloning really creeped me out when you first mentioned it, but I am paying for an ElevenLabs account. I’m not using my voice yet, because it’s not good enough. But I have tinkered with the API and will probably be adding a “listen to this” audio player to every article at some point in the future. I’ve got it working, but haven’t put it in place and haven’t calculated what it would cost.
Ideally I would be able to append each story with 2 seconds of text in the API: This audio version sponsored by Central Bank.Followed by the article.
The bottom line is AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are making it possible to accomplish tasks that once required hours David doesn’t have as a one-man operation. And the athletes and their families are the big winners.
Barb and I were in DC in 2009 and during a cab ride back to our hotel, we struck up a conversation with the driver and asked about celebrities-he-has-driven. His list included: Telly Savalas, Senator James Lugar and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
I came across this old post tonight and found this an amusing group of names and shared it with my friend David. Our chat thread (from earlier this evening):
My point here is that genuinely funny people like David are funny fast. They’re quick. And, yes, I realize you have no idea who Telly Savalas is or Carnac the Magnificent.
A plague is upon us and I have hunkered down (a word one gets to use so infrequently). I’ve been using the time at home to call/text old friends, like David Brazeal. David almost certainly the most amusing person I know. Perhaps droll would be a better word for David. From just one short iMessage exchange:
The biggest hardship right now is that all my usual hypochondria, normally spread out over my entire body, is not centered in my chest and lung area.
This has also been good for me to discover which businesses still have my email address from a purchase I made 7 years ago. I am fully informed of the COVID-19 response plans of every business with which I have interacted since about 2010.
I have seriously neglected my hunting and gathering skills for 50 years.
David’s bon mots have shown up in my post often enough to deserve their own tag.