I finally received my custom Nokia Suprnova 7310 about a month ago, but I only recently found the time to take some photos and write an entry about it. I’ve been extremely busy with school, and aside from a few of the Haruhi-chan mini-episodes, I haven’t watched any anime since returning from China in April…

I had thought of buying this phone for a long time, but because Nokia Build only currently operates in Europe there were a lot of issues with regard to payment shipping. Luckily I have a friend studying in the UK who bought it on my behalf and brought it over this June. The total was €142 including shipping and VAT (tax), which is approximately $224 CAD or 200 USD. A quick eBay search reveals that the current typical Canadian price is about $190, and that’s without the most important part: the loli custom cover.

Naturally, it’s a little embarrassing to have it out; luckily it came with extra covers that can be quickly interchanged. I imagine for more professional environments I’ll have to think ahead and stick on the blue cover. The green one is plain fugly, but it was either blue & green or pink & white.

The resolution and quality of the custom image are mediocre, if you look closely there’s some obvious distortion from downsampling and I’d have preferred a matte finish over a glossy finish. But, thinking about it, people will either be too engrossed or disgusted over the content to make such observations.

The default ring tone right now is ‘Don’t Say Lazy’ (the ED theme from K-ON) and I made a Mio theme for the menu and startup/shutdown screens. I’m wondering what accessories to put on it, maybe a lace-like string not unlike the Fujibayashi’s hair… whatever you call it?

1:50 Laser-cut anime figures from 3mm basswood

In other Otaku news, I had some extra time with the laser cutter and I decided to cut out some 1:50 scale figures out of 3mm basswood to use in my architecture models. Anime figures are the easiest, firstly because I have a huge collection of images, and secondly because the cel-shading and relatively simple backgrounds call for easy extraction. In many cases I could just plop them into Photoshop, run a few filters, send it to Illustrator and live-trace the outline. I also had my wallpaper which already had silhouetted figures which can go directly into illustrator for a live-trace. I already have 80 or so cuts of about 10 different characters (some anime some non-anime) but I’m definitely going to do this again if I book spare time on the laser cutter in the future.

The following are my source images. I left out a lot of details like kannagi’s hair and shoujo-wand, because I am using these in an academic context and I don’t want it to be totally obvious that I’m using anime characters…