I just tried it with a freebie compact from a makeup store and a single piece of tape (definitely simpler than these tape/pencil/coin shenanigans), and it worke

I just tried it with a freebie compact from a makeup store and a single piece of tape (definitely simpler than these tape/pencil/coin shenanigans), and it worked better than I've been able to get any CD to work while taking literally less than a minute to set up properly. Proof: https://i.imgur.com/OF29Ci3.jpg https://i.imgur.com/OF29Ci3.jpg I'm really struggling to see how the pencil/CD/coin solution is better. I wouldn't be surprised if more teachers have compacts readily available than CDs. I think the whole CD thing is going viral because it falls into the "clever lifehack" bucket, i.e. it is optimized for hackiness virality while not actually being the best/simplest solution to the problem. But a simple compact taped to a laptop screen isn't as interesting of a "hack", and thus doesn't go viral. (Also -- conveniently -- the layer of glass/plastic on compacts is super thin, basically just barely enough to prevent the aluminum or whatever from oxidizing and from you getting the mirrored surface all fingerprinty, so it doesn't seem to cause noticeable internal reflection problems. And it's thinner than the layer of plastic on CDs, which are NOT first surface mirrors, which is easily provable by scratching the bottom of the CD and noting that you're scratching the plastic and not the reflective material directly.)