One of the laws of life nowadays is that as soon as you buy your ideal gadget, an even more ideal version of it arrives, and you think, ooh, I wish I had waited and got that one instead.

Within weeks, or so it seemed, of me buying my Lumix Blah Blah 150, out pops the Lumix Blah Blah 200 which does everything the Lumix Blah Blah 150 does, but even more.  In that case the improvement was photoing in low light, which is something I like to do quite a lot when photoing speakers at meetings, indoors.

And now, I buy a Google Nexus 4 Smartphone, which is okay, in fact very okay.  But this looks even better, this being a Samsung Blah Blah, which is a smartphone, but with a substantially bigger screen.  The Google Nexus 4 is Google’s answer to the question: What is now a great Smartphone?  A smartphone being the size of regular Smartphone.  Samsung, on the other hand, asked the question: What is the maximum size of screen a Smartphone can reasonably have?  Which I think is a better question.

Here is a picture that shows the difference.  On the left is a regular Samsung smartphone, which is the exact same size as my Google Nexus 4.  On the right is the new Samsung Blah Blah, which is a smartphone, but bigger.

Although I can get typing done happily when I am out and about, I have to admit that a bigger screen would be better.  That way you get a smartphone and a tablet.  A “phablet”.

I first set eyes on this Samsung Phablet the night before last, when I attended a meeting also attended by a friend of mine who already had one, despite the fact that this particular phablet has yet to be launched in the UK.  He showed it to us.  I was impressed.  His was bigger than mine.

A recent piece about this Samsung Phablet (sorry – have forgotten where this was) said: Who the hell wants a smartphone this big?  Well, I do.  Better for typing, better for reading books, better for everything, and well within my geriatric weight limit.

The thing is, you want everything done when you are out and about with one machine.  What you (by which I mean I) do not want is to be lugging around a phone and a “tablet”, which is why tablets are a no-no for me, as yet, unless you go for something like this.  This Phablet changes that completely.

Despite me having missed this particular bus this time around, I really hope that this phablet formula catches on.  The good news for me is that the Samsung Phablet now costs around four hundred quid, and I paid only a bit over two hundred for my Google Nexus 4.  But with luck, phablets will soon be only two hundred quid, and I will be able to buy one with a total cost to me of buying a phablet now.  And of course the two hundred quid phablet in a year’s time will be a year better than the phablet is now.

And note this.  If Rob Fisher is right (I think he is) about what a good idea it is for all your computing to be done with the same little box of tricks, this phablet, being bigger than the smartphone, will accommodate more tricks.

To anyone who says, but talking into this gadget would be ridiculous, I reply: no, it would not.  I might look ridiculous to you, but I do not care what looks ridiculous to you, only what actually is – or, in this case, is not - ridiculous for me.

The same rule applies to taking pictures with a tablet.  Does this look silly to people to whom it looks silly?  Yes.  Does it make sense to those who now do this? Yes, perfect sense.  Get used to it.  Photoing with tablets is here to stay.  Ditto photoing with phablets, when people start doing that.

Here are a couple more pictures of smartphone-tablet-phablet related kit that I encountered while trying to learn more about the Samsung Phablet.  First, a gadget for combining a smartphone and a pair of binoculars:

This is not yet a thing you can buy.  Watch the video there and you will learn that so far this is just an idea, which is still at the stage of soliciting investment.

And here is a picture of a zoom lens that you can attach to a tablet.

This seems like a slightly better idea.  But what do I know?

The person writing the article with this picture at the top of it does the usual this-looks-ridiculous routine.  But personally (see above) I don’t think it is ridiculous.

I really hope I get to see someone doing this, and photo them myself, before cameras inside tablets get to be so good that you don’t need to shove more lenses on them from outside.

Here.  I will, Real Soon Now, be submitting this for inclusion in David Thompson’s next collection of Friday Ephemera.

One benefit of meeting up with fellow libertarians is that together we sort out the world.  But there is also the matter of sorting out the ongoing activities of the libertarian movement itself.

When I finally got to the Rose and Crown did some exploratory chit-chatting with Simon Gibbs, about such things as future writings for Libertarian Home by me (I promise nothing but hope to do something) and about how he does his videos.  I would like to get good at doing videos, but don’t know where to start.  Except now I do.  Simon has agreed to teach me what he does.  He uses Adobe Premier Elements.  So, that’s what I have in mind to be using.  I also showed him my camera, the reviews of which when I first bought it said it would be good at video.  Will that do?  Yes, he said.

In exchange I was able to offer Simon some tips about how to do radio in general and the BBC’s Moral Maze in particular, which he was nearly on last week, and will surely be on Real Soon Now.

I daresay similar conversations were going on elsewhere in the room, where other libertarian doings were likewise being furthered.

I also got to talk with Richard Carey, who is to be my next Last Friday speaker but one.  Which means that I now have my next three Last Fridays sorted.  February 22: Michael Jennings.  (We now – at last - have Samizdata author archives!) March 29: Richard Carey.  April 26: Rob Fisher.  Michael will be telling us some of the things he has learned about the globe and its ways of organising itself from his various globe trottings.  Rob will be talking about open source software.  And now it is pretty much settled that Richard will talk about the relationship between libertarianism and Austrian Economics.  Excellent. Email me (see “contact” top left here) if you want to know more about any of these events.

Oddly enough, the one thing I didn’t think to do at this gathering was take any photos.  I was similarly forgetful on the Last Friday of January.

Neither omission was at all clever.  Photos create an aura of significance, a penumbra of meaningfulness, a force field of where-it’s-at-ness.  Not much.  A bit.  We can all do out bit, and bits like that are easily done by me, except that on these two nights, they weren’t.

And after all that I went home, watched some TV, and then went to bed.

A cat gets into a box.  Eventually.  Video.  Here.

And no, I don’t know what language that is.

This afternoon Antoine Clarke and I, all being well, will be having a recorded chat about the US presidential election.

[LATER: Here is the recording.  Not everything went well.  If my computer’s response is anything to go by, you will hear this through only one speaker, and in somewhat imperfect sound.  But nobody listens to BrianMicklethwaitDotCom sound files to be knocked out by their superb sound quality.  What we both say is audible, and the good news is that the file is far smaller than usual.  I hope that, if you listen, you enjoy it.  It lasts just under 45 minutes.]

Meanwhile, here is another attempt to embed a video here.  This time it’s John McCain, talking about just how badly Obama screwed up this Benghazi business.

That got shown on CBS.  How many people have watched it, or will watch it before the election, I have no idea.  The importance of this and all the other Obama scandals is not that they are scandalous, but whether or not large numbers of Americans are hearing about them.

I have been speculating that the “mainstream” media would maybe desert Obama.  Well, a few people in it are expressing doubts, but on the whole media bias has never been more blatant and brazen.  This is because Obama is, far more than any previous Democrat, their perfect candidate.  Hard left, and determined to inflict (in a thoroughly bad way) fundamental change on America.  I really want these media people to get the kicking of their lives.

Obama’s enemies are still trying to sort out whether they think Obama is merely crass by nature, or evil on purpose.  We may never know.  Successful people (and Obama has been very successful by most measurements) do what they are best at.

I cannot for the the life of me see how re-electing Obama could possibly be anything but a giant act of folly and self-destruction on the part of America.

The BBC, by the way, are still saying that this election is a dead heat.  Or this is what they said on the 9am news bulletin on Radio 3, just before CD Review last Saturday.  Others say Obama is going to get landslided.  I think landslide, but ... we shall see.

If the video isn’t working properly, please let me know.  Not that I will then know what to do, but it will influence my enthusiasm for further such attempts.

I now think Romney is going to win big.  Part of why I think that is captured in point 2 in that graphic, which I found here.  No one has to know.

In particular, the pollsters do not have to know.  I think the polls have, all along, been wrong about this election, wronger than ever before.  The polls are not being told what people have been, are, and will be thinking.  The polls were wrong when they said Obama was walking it.  They are wrong now that they are saying it’s close.  They will be wrong when they say Romney will just about win, as they soon will.  But on the day, in the real poll, Obama is going to be slaughtered.  Romney will win all the “battleground” states and several which are not now even thought to be in contention.

What polls tell you is not what the result will be.  They tell you what the pollsters think the result will be.  How do they know what they know?  Same way I do.  They guess.  (In this respect, poll results remind me of economic models.) Okay that isn’t entirely true.  I myself factor in what the polls say when I make my guesses.  But the polls are sufficiently wrong to be very wrong indeed, for an event that can be bent into a completely different shape by single figure percentage point errors.

[LATER: Actually, I think I got the first two sentences of the paragraph above wrong.  It should read: “What polls tell you is not what voters are thinking.  They tell you what the pollsters think the voters are thinking”.  What I actually put is indeed “not entirely true”.  This explains, I think, and as my original version does not, why pollsters don’t get the result right, but do get right the direction in which opinion is heading at any particular moment, which, as I introspect, I have been letting them tell me about.  Because they do get that right. The misleading samples of people that the pollsters each talk to include a few who change their minds, and the pollsters do pick up on this.  So, now, the pollsters are getting right that opinion is flowing steadily away from Obama and towards Romney.  But at no stage in this process did, or do, or will they register how bad things were, and are, and will be, for Obama.  End of LATER.]

We shall see, etc.

Debate Two between Obama and Romney has now become about whether Obama can win by a knockout.  Maybe he can.  But, he won’t.

Romney’s final burst of adverts will have further impact.  Obama’s adverts have accomplished little.  They said Romney isn’t likable, is a right wing nutjob, etc.  Debate One negated this message.  They said something about “Big Bird”.  Ridiculous.  But that doesn’t prove that adverts accomplish nothing, by their nature.  Just as in the debates, and unlike Obama, Romney (and Ryan) have plenty of persuasive things that they want to say.

In a comment on this, I noted that the TV Umpire lady in the Vice President debate did Biden no favours by allowing him to behave so very badly.  Had she told him early on to stop his giggling and interrupting, Biden might well have won that debate.  But give TV Umpire lady her due, she did at least interrupt Ryan, whenever his speeches were starting to sound too eloquent.

But Romney’s adverts can correct that, by saying everything Team Romney now wants to say, and which the mainstream media have until now stopped them saying by less expensive means.  And, they can use the exact words which will work best.

Plus, Team Romney will have, I believe, another two debates worth of Obama waffle to use, like they have already used Biden’s laughing.

Like Jim Bennett said:

John, let me suggest that the criteria for victory are changing. The debate no longer ends when the debaters walk off stage. And now it no longer ends when the TV spinners have, like cuckoos, laid their eggs and flown away. There is now the long, long reverberation in social media, where the basic debate footage serves as raw material for mash-ups and parodies and treatments for the rest of the election cycle and beyond. And Biden’s performance, which won him some tactical advantage in the debate, has set him up as the target for rich satire and a way that Ryan’s conventional performance didn’t and cannot do. His performance is comic gold, and although within hard-core Dem/left circles he will be celebrated as the warrior, everywhere else, and especially for basically apolitical young YouTube viewers, he will be the jackass supreme. I suspect that by Election Day, the various parodic videos will have had a larger viewership than the debate itself. By this criterion, the tactic was a massive miscalculation.

If the same thing happens to Obama, between now and the election (I believe it will), he really will be slaughtered.

But … we shall see.

LATER: Mitt Romney in a landslide.

I am a godless supporter of gay marriage, but I do love this, not just because it says Don’t Vote Obama, but because it says it so eloquently.  He is such a great speaker.

Proof that eloquent speaking straight to camera is more than good enough for the YouTube age.

Thanks, yet again, to Instapundit.

I told you (in the Romney’s Going To Win Big posting below) that they’d break ranks:

In my opinion Pat Caddell suggests a golden age of mainstream media non-bias that never really existed.  But nevertheless, interesting.

I found this here, via here.  I am not that clever at embedding video, so apologies if this starts out all over the place.  Please tell me if, at your end, it still is.

I hope this goes viral.

On the other hand, there’s this:

“Obama’s fighting for his life, his party is fighting for their life, and they’re winning. This is, I’ve said all along, this is Romney’s election to lose and by God he’s losing,” Caddell said.

Well, I think Romney is already winning, but I can’t believe he won’t come out of his corner and land a few big blows, come debates time, but maybe he won’t.  Like I say, we’ll see.