Disable the Touchpad and Trackpoint Pointer in Linux

The mouse pointer on my Arch Linux system was going crazy. It was drifting badly and my mouse was unusable most of the time. Very frustrating. I thought I narrowed the problem down to a hardware issue on the touchpad. I have a USB mouse, so I don't really need the touchpad. I came across this script to toggle the touchpad on and off.

#!/bin/bash
synclient TouchpadOff=$(synclient -l | grep -c 'TouchpadOff.*=.*0')

This does indeed toggle the touchpad, but my problem still remained. So, the touchpad wasn't the problem. Then I saw the Trackpoint pointer sitting in the middle of my keyboard (otherwise known as an eraser pointer or the colorfully nicknamed clit mouse). So I dug around and found I could disable it easily enough. First, get the name of the device by running:

xinput

In my case the name is "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint". Then disable it with this:

xinput set-prop "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint" "Device Enabled" 0

Problem solved. Hopefully someone else will find this useful.