I find paper will work indoors if you scrape it up with a knife. You should get a mixture of dust and thin scraggly bits. The action is not to cut the paper but to scratch it. I've never used a fire-drill, but I gather that too works by first creating dust then igniting it. Toilet or tissue paper can be easier to work with. I suspect it is possible with a $1 bill or a £5 note, but I've not seriously tried it.

Vasaline is good once you have a flame, but I find it inhibits getting the flame from a spark. There has been talk here recently about candle-wax working as well as vasaline without being as messy.

Just to be clear, there are typically several stages to starting a fire:
(1) Something to make a spark, eg ferro rod or Sparklite.
(2) Something to turn the spark into a flame, eg cotton wool, paper dust.
(3) Something to keep the flame going for a few minutes, eg cotton wool+vasaline, wood curlings, paper
(4) Something to make the flame bigger - eg twigs about as thick as a pencil.

and then you have to work up to burning big logs if that is what you are going to do. (I'm glossing over the later stages but it's important in the wild to have your main fuel stacked up ready.) When people talk about "tinder" they may mean stage (3), but they may also mean stage (2), and although some materials can do both jobs they are. in my view, different.

A cigarette lighter combines stages (1) and (2), eg using flint and gas, but in my experience if you want to, eg, light a Esbit-style hex fuel tab then it still helps to have a stage (3). A lot of fuel needs to be exposed to flame for 20+ seconds, if not minutes if it is windy, before it will properly catch. With cotton wool + vasaline, or commercial equivalents like TinderQuik, the cotton wool is providing stage (2) and the vasaline is providing stage (3) - in stage (3) the wool is acting like a candle wick and the vasaline is what is actually burning. A Trianga-style alcohol stove is unusual in that the fumes from the liquid can provide stage (2) and that's all you need to keep it burning, so you just need a spark and no other tinder.

With a fire-drill, stage (1) isn't a spark but the heat of friction. With a fire-piston, the initial heat comes from compression. I acquired a fire piston recently but haven't played with it much yet - it produces a red ember and you still have to turn the ember into an actual flame.

To get paper lighted - newspaper, toilet paper, paper napkin, photocopier paper, how the paper comes into contact with the sparks will make all the difference. I have tried this with a MFS and a sparky. No success with a sparklite yet.

Get a small piece of paper about an inch square and align the edge of the paper with the edge of the hacksaw blade. Hold blade and paper horizontal with paper side up between thumb and index finger. Use other hand to strike the MFS/ sparky / magfire down against the edge of the hacksaw blade to create sparks. Do it rapidly and with consistent force so that you create a mass of hot metal which lands on top & under the paper.

Best way to describe it would be how you strike a flint and steel with the char cloth on the flint, the paper being the charcloth, the blade being the flint and the firesteel being the, well, steel....

Newspaper and toilet paper should light pretty quickly, more effort is needed for normal photocopy paper. would be better if you shred it but I can now do it without any shredding of the paper....

You must have read my mind, Brangdon! The concept of more than one type of tinder was almost gelled in my mind when you described it so well in your post.

As a recent BAS (new acronym - "Born Again Survivalist") the second thing I added to my EDC after a knife was a BSA Hotspark on my keychain.

In the old days, I could build a fire in the worst of conditions with one match. So to me, "tinder" was always #3, with numbers 1 and 2 being provided by the match. While I did experiment with the military type magnesium block / ferro rod firestarter, the magnesium does a good job of #2.

With the hotspark only, I'm finding natural (#2) tinder materials harder to come by. Dry cattail fuzz works, as does very fine dry grass and finely shredded cedar bark. My goal is to get good with wood shavings, since the others can't always be found in a given area.

Now, for #3 I've never had trouble finding natural materials no matter where I am. My two favorites are birch bark and dry pine needles.

- Tom Scarince

Update:
Just found a #2 tinder to go with my #3 dry pine needles - pine pitch. It worked better when I mixed in a few pine needles as wick material.

- Tom Scarince