Glorious Stylus

Turn your touchpad into a drawing tablet with this high tech stylus!

1. get a mechanical pencil or other phallic object which is comfortable in your hand.
2. grab about 4 inches of tinfoil off a standard roll (approx 12 inches wide)..
3. tear off about 1/4 of the tin foil strip and roll it up into a ball.
4. on a smooth surface, like a glass table, flatten the ball of foil on two sides, as if you were making a coin.
5. with your foil coin shaped to about 1/4 inch wide you've got the right part.
6. wrap the pencil with the foil, like you're rolling a cigarette. Leave the end of the tube at the point of the pencil hanging over a bit and open.
7. cram the litttle coin you made into the tube. Try to position it to sit at a 45 degree angle with respect to the shaft of the pencil.
8. fold the open end of the tube over the little coin. Get everything positioned correctly.
9. wrap the tapering end of the pencil with clear tape to make it a little sturdy. You'll want the coin shaped blob at the tip to be able to flex a little but you don't want to foil to come unwrapped or tear.
10. run a strip of tape down the shaft of the pencil to hold the end of the foil down. You don't want the tube to unravel.
11. Adjust your touchpad settings, turning off all the fancy gliding effects and such. If your touchpad lets you save "profiles" you may want to save your current settings and your drawing settings so you can switch between the two easily. Also, if your touchpad has a palm check setting you may need to readjust that.
12. Adjust your mouse settings. Crank the pointer speed all the way up to full and turn off the "enhance pointer precision" option.
13. The point of changing the mouse settings is to make the touchpad more reactive to your pencil thingy and stop the software from generating any motion (like gliding). With my synaptics touchpad on my hp pavilion dv6 I am able to get this thing working well enough to let me sign my name and draw pictures as naturally as if I were doing it on paper.
14. Download Gimp and do something magical http://www.gimp.org/

You can see a copy of my signature, drawn with this Glorious Atropan Tech. at: https://googledrive.com/host/0B-6l01K_rmVlX2NXRkt6aWlZUkk/Gimpness/Kastor.png