Archive for June, 2010

“Hack in the box” in Amsterdam July 1&2

Monday, June 14th, 2010

Hack in the box Amsterdam

It is pretty exiting … the “Hack in the Box” conference is coming to Europe. And the good news is that it will be organized in my home town: Amsterdam. Over the years our friends of Toool.US always manned the lockpick village in the overseas “hack in the box’ events, but since the next one is organized in the Netherlands, the Toool.nl crew was asked to run it. Of course we accepted and are very motivated to make it a great event and a special lockpick village!. And besides the village we will also organize a two hour hands on presentation. So far Han, Jos and I volunteered to run the village but I expect more Toool members to join in.

And because of our support, members of Toool and readers of blackbag can get a nice discount on the entrance fee! Drop me a mail if you want to attend and I will make sure you will get a nice discount!

Another big thing of course is the next Hope conference in New York. Han and I will do a presentation and we will assist the other usual suspects to run the lockpick village there …

When every second counts: formula 1 impressioning tool

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

impressioning speed up tool

Our German friends from SSDeV decided to change the rules of the impressioning games. Instead of the fastest time on one lock, now more locks need to be opened and the person opening the most locks in the least amount of time wins. In the comments of this Hackaday post Jos explains the exact rules:

“First round everybody gets a keyed alike lock (so same amount of work) this round takes an hour. The six fastest go to the finals: during six rounds (20 min. each) all the contenders open one lock, which then gets swapped. So all finalists open the same 6 locks. The used keys are put in closed boxes so there is no way you know the key is supposed to look like.”

And with opening times of less then a minute these games are more and more looking like formula 1 pit stops. And so people are trying to come up with ideas and tools to shave off a few seconds left or right. The expert on the field of impressioning is Oliver Diederichsen. It was his research and book that really got us all started at this. And he came up with a new tool. It is a modified euro-profile cylinder that contains five sharp solid pins that will scratch the blank at the position the pins will make contact with it. Once these marks are on the blank, it is just a matter of filing them down to code 1-1-1-1-1 and start impressioning.

Before and after

As Oliver is one of the most fair people I know, he shared the design and allowed others to copy it for future games. So Jord Knaap made a nice handle that contains a half euro profile with the steel pins. And the euro-profile core in Jord’s tool is interchangeable. At the back of the tool there is a small hole that will allow you to push out the cylinder and change it for another brand.

To come back to the games: they were won by good old Atrhur Meister, followed by Oliver Diederichsen and Jos Weyers. Congratulations guys. Looking forward to the impressioning games at Lockcon in a couple of months …

the champs