April 20, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
I've been seeing a lot of "digital headshots" ads lately. My "new hairdoo" (or lack there of) makes me feel strange with my mop head professionally so I thought I'd give one a try. This sample on InstaHeadshot's home page...
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April 19, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
The latest update to Microsoft Copilot has introduced tools that were previously reserved for software developers and data scientists. As demonstrated by creator Robert Triebwasser (@robert.triebwasser), these new "superpowers"—driven by the GPT-5.4 "Think Deeper" model—allow you to transform raw data...
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April 7, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
I recently ran across the research of the late Dr. Albert A. Bartlett, a physics professor who spent decades warning that our greatest human flaw is an inability to understand the exponential function. His most famous analogy involved bacteria doubling...
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March 27, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
OpusClip Agent is not a purely generative video model like OpenAI's Sora or Google's Veo, which dream up continuous pixel streams. Instead, it functions as an AI Orchestrator, coordinating several existing AI technologies to build a stylized animation. The process...
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March 22, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
In the world of AI, we often find ourselves treating chatbots like colleagues. We say “please,” we offer a “thank you,” and sometimes we even apologize for a typo. But recent data suggests that this digital etiquette comes with a...
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March 15, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
I spent some time looking how AI can "describe" a video and provide guidelines on how that video might be able to be improved. I then wanted to be able to move those notes into time coded markers to help...
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March 8, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
Twenty years ago, if I wanted to set up a transcription service, I’d be knee-deep in UNIX shell scripts on a Silicon Graphics workstation, likely manually compiling libraries for hours. Today, I did it in under 30 minutes using Claude...
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March 3, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
We've had conversations for sometime to see if we should have a "Duke voice" to use for official voice over production using tools like Elevenlabs. There are still many discussions to have if this is in fact something we should...
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February 27, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
In academic video production, my primary tool has always been creating video—2D and linear. However, my ongoing testing with organic chemistry visualizations pushed me to try a different approach. After receiving some excellent feedback, I tried SVG (and ultimately WebGL)...
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February 23, 2026
By: Stephen Toback
What began as a simple experiment turned into a full benchmarking session. I found a sepia tone photograph of my father-in-law from the 1950s. I wanted to see what it might look like in color, so I started uploading it...
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