Opinion

The Fantastic Piece of Tinfoil in my Wallet

​Published on December 12, 2025 3:30 AM GMT

The gates in the lobby of my workplace annoyed me for years: they
would often reject my access card, and I’d need to tap several times.
After a while I realized that the reader was getting confused by the
other RFID cards in my wallet, and if I pulled the card out of my
wallet first it worked every time.

This turned out to be very easy to fix: tape a piece of tinfoil to the
back of my access card:

I feel a bit silly that after spending months pulling the card out
each time the fix ended up taking me a couple minutes. I often decide
to put up with minor annoyances instead of thinking about whether
there’s a way to fix them, and I think overall that has made my life
substantially better, but in this case even a little thought would
have been well worth it!

Discuss ​Read More

​Published on December 12, 2025 3:30 AM GMT

The gates in the lobby of my workplace annoyed me for years: they
would often reject my access card, and I’d need to tap several times.
After a while I realized that the reader was getting confused by the
other RFID cards in my wallet, and if I pulled the card out of my
wallet first it worked every time.

This turned out to be very easy to fix: tape a piece of tinfoil to the
back of my access card:

I feel a bit silly that after spending months pulling the card out
each time the fix ended up taking me a couple minutes. I often decide
to put up with minor annoyances instead of thinking about whether
there’s a way to fix them, and I think overall that has made my life
substantially better, but in this case even a little thought would
have been well worth it!

Discuss ​Read More

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *