Posted by surprisetalk 10/22/2024
Is that so? My intuition is that it should depend on the side of the door the lock is mounted on. Most locks I have seen open by turning them away from the side where the latch is on, to move the bolt in the direction it is being turned, and that feels pretty natural to me. Isn't that the norm?
My apartment key opens 7 different locks, 1 of which opens clockwise, 5 counterclockwise, and 1 I don't know right now because it isn't actually mounted on a door and doesn't move a bolt.
Some don't, and it pisses me off every time.
• Get some small magnets. I used these 8 mm diameter 1mm thick disk magnets [1].
• Attach one to each key near the hole for the keyring. Orient the magnets so the each is attracted to the magnets on the neighboring keys.
When hanging on your keyring your keys will then form one unit which won't jangle.
You want magnets that are strong enough to attract through the keys. If yours need a little help you could try putting a magnet on each side of the key.
I held them on by wrapping some tape around the key.
I'm fairly meh about it, largely because I don't think it's good value. It was pretty hard for me to spend $60 on a keyring, and the knife is also fairly meh (I prefer locking+spring assisted opening knives for EDC). Also their "Key return service" is fairly meh; not really looking forward to another $4.99 service charge every year that I have to manage, when paying $60 for this thing.
Another company, KeySmart, has a similar device and it's more compact but doesn't do the "attachments" thing, so you'd carry a knife if you wanted that. They have one that has Tile finding device built in, as long as you remember to charge it. I had one for ~4 years with a Tile device attached to it, that had a dead battery for 90% of the time I had it.
I'd be tempted to get one of the smaller key organizers with an AirTag holder and set up a little magsafe charging setup that I could just drop my keys into.
I mostly don't lose my keys very often, but once in the last decade I dropped them while taking the kids around the neighborhood trick-or-treating and I don't want to repeat that experience, mostly because I keep a couple office keys on my ring.
Car keys don’t though, as far as I can remember.
Having a symmetrical key isn't something that I even cared about but I suppose it's a bonus.
Having a symmetrical key isn't something that I even care about but I suppose it's a bonus.
It was after a painful deadlock situation that we initially retro-fitted an electronic lock into the old front door which we carried over to the new door once we renovated the entire floor.
* If/When the battery dies, does the lock default to locked setting? I assume so, but how annoying would this be?
* Being a privacy nut, does the lock come with a pre-determined code, or can you generate your own? I assume you should be able to create your own, but figuried I'd ask.
Instead of answering my questions, if you have an online reference that you might have used to decide going this route, would be great if you could share. Thanks!
Typically, the home locks are just actuated mechanical locks. So the lock will stay in whatever state it was when the battery died. If you want to get into commercial-grade locks, there are magnetic locks that can be configured to fail open or close on power loss.
Anyway, the battery is not a big deal. I have a Kwikset lock with a ZigBee module, it runs on 4 AAA batteries. I switched to Li-ion rechargables several years ago, and they last for about 6 months between recharges with moderate door use. It's even longer if the lock is not used often.
And the lock starts beeping annoyingly after opening/closing when the batteries get down to 30%, giving you plenty of time to replace them.
> * Being a privacy nut, does the lock come with a pre-determined code, or can you generate your own?
You always can set your own combinations. And there are biometric locks.
It auto locks after each use but no confirmation the door was closed and secured correctly.
The Yale mentioned above will gladly auto-lock with the door still open and it will report as locked in the app. Not to bad if you know you closed the door but by just looking in the app someone might have left it open and it "locked" itself.
It will say it wouldn't lock, if say the door was partially closed and the bolt couldn't move.
I'm assuming another component needs to be in the door well to detect the bolt.
Anyone know any consumer level smart devices that do this?
After that I replaced it with a plain old mechanical lock. Never again touching any smart home crap.
I'm sure I didn't use the wrong code three times, something must have happened the 2nd/3rd times like a key didn't get pressed hard enough to register. But regardless, the lesson is there's a bunch of possible failure scenarios you won't think of.
(There is no reason to give up on smart home devices as a category due to one badly designed device).
>"All women are whores. Sorry to break it to you." -Kyle Benzel, Sept 28, 2022, Hacker News, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010046 (log in or create an HN account, and set showdead=true to view the evidence)
That's exactly why I directly quoted and linked to your own highly inappropriate and inaccurate words, that you posted here on Hacker News. There's no denying that you wrote them, it's on your permanent record.
So explain exactly what you meant when you wrote "All women are whores. Sorry to break it to you."
It's appropriate for me to quote your own words back to you and ask you about them, which is my right, because you viciously and personally insulted my mother, as well as your own mother too, and also four billion other women, including trans women, because they are truly women too.
As misogynistic, bigoted, idiotic, inappropriate, hateful, distasteful, and false as your own words and actions are, you might believe you have the right to call your own mother a whore because you of all people would know, but certainly not all other women, and definitely not here.
You should keep your attacks and accusations a private family matter, and get family counseling for your mental illness, instead of inappropriately airing your problems here publicly on Hacker News for all to read, no matter how "sorry to break it to you" you insincerely claim to be. If you meant that non-apology apology, you wouldn't have posted anything -- it just proves mens rea, your awareness that your actions were wrong.
And you should be sorry you posted it in the first place, so you owe all women a sincere public apology for what you insincerely publicly said.
Why did you call my mother and your mother and all other women whores in public, and do you apologize?
You should take your own advice. His comment from over two years ago may have been unpleasant, but you hectoring him for it now, apropos of nothing, is downright creepy and indicates an unbalanced mental state.
It’s why I like the system from Ubiquiti, but it lacks certain features (Apple nfc keys) that make it not worth the cost for me.
I have a car, a father, and an office.
If I do upgrade, possibly use the system from Ubiquiti since I already have most of their equipment
Yes, always
>2. Order your keys clockwise based on the direction of entry.
Eh, I guess. Depends how many you have and what they're like. I have two nearly identical keys, and the rest (car, mail) require no time to find due to their size. In this scenario, I generally find that sorting keys by physical size makes the ring/carabiner feel more comfortable. That being said, I find the related suggestion to "Drill holes in your keys" <https://practicalbetterments.com/drill-holes-in-your-keys/> a more worthwhile solution to item 2.
All facing the same direction is just ... I mean ... if anyone here doesn't do that ... I don't even ... I gotta wash my hands ...
The downside to this is if your locks are cheapo pin tumbler locks then if an attacker steals the lock itself it is trivial for them to take your lock apart and reverse engineer a key that works in all your other locks (think crazy ex or wacko, rather than burglar.)
If you key your mailbox padlock and your front door alike and the wacko steals the padlock, they can take it home and figure out the code to your house.
My home has three entry points, one with a porch, and all four doors have keyed alike locks. It’s great!
Seconded!
If you aren't up to rekeying locks yourself it is an easy job for a locksmith and shouldn't be too expensive.
If rekeying isn't sufficient because your locks use different shaped keys and so you'll have to get at least some new locks to put everything on a common key, and you are up to doing lock replacements yourself (which unless you've got unusual locks is usually one of the easiest DIY projects), I'd consider using Kwikset SmartKey for the new locks.
Despite what the name suggests these are not electronic locks. They are entirely mechanical, using a normal key. They came out in 2007 before "Smart" had become associated with shoving microprocessors into places they don't belong.
If you want to rekey a SmartKey lock you simply take the current key, insert it, rotate 90° clockwise, insert a tool Kwikset provides through a little hole in the front to press a button, and that releases the key so you can remove it without having to rotate the cylinder back to 0°. Then you can put in a different key, rotate the cylinder 180° counter-clockwise, then back to 0° and remove that key.
The lock is now rekeyed to that second key.
So, just buy your news locks from Home Depot or Lowe's without having to worry about getting locks that are keyed to the same key, install them, look at all the keys they came with and pick which one you want to be the common key, and then go around and rekey them all to that using the procedure described above.
Keep the other keys. They can be useful if you have a guest stay over (assuming you have more than one door to your house). Rekey one of the doors to one of those other keys and give that to the guest. When they leave you can rekey back to your common key.
Kwikset also makes SmartKey padlocks if you want to go all in on the one key thing.
It is left as an exercise to the imagination as to when it an attacker might find advantage in:
t_steal_mailbox +
t_decode_lock +
t_keyed_front_door_entry
t_pick_front_door
There's a technical reason why "bitting up" (teeth up) should be the standard way to install pin tumbler locks. If the bitting faces up, the pins in the lock are directly above the bitting, and the springs are above the pins and not being compressed by the weight of the pins. If the lock is installed upside down such that the key goes in with bitting facing down, then the pins are sitting on top of the springs and may compress down over a period of years. A fatigued spring might not raise the pins to the shear line (the level needed for the lock cylinder to turn) and you'll be locked out.
It seems that most door installers and handymen don't follow any convention about up or down when installing locks.
The idea is to only have the keys I need for a particular journey.