The appropriate files, laser settings, and methodology for putting your tattoo on your powerbook.

as this was boing boing ed a few weeks back i thought i'd show how it is done...

Step 1: Select Your Artwork.

any bmp, jpg, tif, dxf will do. basically any vector or pixel (bitmap) based artwork. the higher res you can do the better. i like vector because it is scale independent.

kiteortho5.pdf
Download

Step 2: Lay Out Artwork in Template File.

You can find here the template files (illustrator CS and illustrator 8 versions) where you can lay out your own artwork. stay out of the apple and the red zones and you will be safe. the apple is plastic (don't laser here) and the red border is the radius at edge of laptop.
You can see here the example of my kite file (dxf original) overlayed to fill fully the page and look a little like an engineer's drawing spec...

Step 3: Determine Raster / Vector Style of Work.

the wave is a cool tif or rasterable image. this means the laser treats pixels as pixels and goes side to side as it builds the image.
the kite is vector meaning the laser follows the path of each individual line and therefore much finer detail can be produced.

Step 4: Set Laser Speeds and Feeds Appropriately.

I use an epilog mini: http://www.epiloglaser.com/mini24_overview.htm

the nice result setting is 50%speed, 100%power for a bitmap image, 20%speed, 100% power for a vector image.