Travel sentry certified luggage lock

The Carl S. English, Jr., Botanical Garden (7 acres) are botanical gardens located on the grounds of the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks at 3015 NW 54th Street, Seattle, Washington. They are open daily 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. without charge.

After the locks were built in 1911, landscape architect Carl English of the United States Army Corps of Engineers transformed the construction site into garden in an English landscape style. All told, he spent 43 years planting and tending the gardens. Today they contain more than 500 species and 1,500 varieties of plants from around the world, including fan palms, oaks, Mexican pines, rhododendrons, and a fine display of roses.

• Leave a comment... (0)

Bingley Five Rise Locks is a staircase lock on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal at Bingley (). As the name implies, a boat going up the lock is lifted in five stages.

Description

In effect the 5-rise consists of five locks connected together with (as always with a staircase) no intermediate “pounds”: the lower gate of each chamber forms the upper gate of the chamber below. There are therefore five chambers, and six gates (the top and bottom gates and four intermediate gates). As the Leeds Liverpool canal is a wide canal, the chambers are 14 feet wide, and each “gate” consists of two half-gates, “hinged” from opposite sides of the canal. Each half gate is slightly more than 7 feet wide, so that the two halves close in a “V” shape (pointing “upstream”). Water pressure on the “uphill” side of the gate thus keeps it tightly closed until the water levels on either side are equal, when the gate can be opened and the boat moved to the next chamber (see canal locks for more information on how a lock is constructed and operated).

The 5-rise is the steepest flight of lock in the UK, with a gradient of about 1:5 (a rise of 59ft 2in over a distance of 320ft). The intermediate and bottom gates are the tallest in the country. Because of the complications of working a staircase lock, and because so many boaters (both first-time hirers and new owners) are inexperienced, a full-time lock keeper is employed, and the locks are padlocked “out of hours”. Barry Whitelock, the “locky”, after twenty years based here is now almost infamous on the local canals. Barry was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2006 New Year Honours List for “Services to Inland Waterways in the North”

History

It opened on March 21 1774 and was a major feat of engineering at the time. When the locks and therefore the canal from Gargrave to Leeds was opened in 1774 a crowd of 30,000 people turned out to celebrate it! The first boat to use the locks took just 28 minutes and the whole first trip is described here as it was in a newspaper of the time - the Leeds Intelligencer. The smaller Three Rise opened at the same time just a few hundred meters further down.

During 2000-2004, famous Leeds Chartered Surveyor, Gerwyn Bryan, lived in the famous cottage looking down on the locks, which appears in many pictures of the locks.

Tourism

The “flight” (it is a moot point whether a staircase is strictly a “flight”, used strictly the term means a group of locks separated by intermediate pounds, so each lock has its own top and bottom gates) is a major tourist attraction in the area. Most boats that pass through attract a lot of attention especially at weekends where they may be a crowd of thirty people or more watching a boat go up or down!

Maintenance

The staircase underwent extensive restorative maintenance in 2004,and again in 2006 when the lock gates and paddles were replaced. As is expected with such a feat of engineering it requires a lot of maintenance and is often on British Waterway’s list of winter stoppages for maintenance.

• Leave a comment... (0)

A bored cylindrical lock is one in which two holes are bored, perpendicular to one another, into the door. A large hole is bored into the door face and a smaller crossbore hole is bored into the door edge, as opposed to a mortise lock prep cut into the edge of the door. Typically, the face hole is sized from 1.5 inches to 2.125 inches (3.8 to 5.4 cm) and is centered at 2.375 inches or 2.75 inches (6.0 cm or 7.0 cm) from the leading edge of the door, this distance is referred to as the backset. Other, less popular, backsets are at 3.75 and 5 inches (9.5 and 12.7 cm). Residential doors are normally prepared for a 2.375 inch (6.0 cm) backset and commercial doors at a 2.75 inch (7 cm) backset.

History

The cylindrical lock was invented by Walter Schlage in 1909.

The bored cylindrical lock arose from a need for a more cost-effective method of locking doors. The previous norm, the mortise lock, is a more complex device, and its higher manufacturing cost as well as its more labor intensive installation make the bored cylindrical lock an ideal substitute, both in price and functionality.

Currently

The great majority of locks now in use on residences in North America are a variation of the cylindrical lock and are known as tubular chassis locks. Generally, they are not as strong as a cylindrical lock.

• Leave a comment... (0)

A tubular pin tumbler lock, also known as Ace lock or “axial pin tumbler lock” or “radial lock”, is a variety of pin tumbler lock in which 6-8 pins are arranged in a circular pattern, and the corresponding key is tubular or cylindrical in shape.

J.A. Blake is credited with patenting the first tubular lock in 1833. Walter R. Schlage continued the development of the tubular lock. He was awarded 11 patents, and his improvements made the tubular lock what it is today.

Tubular locks are commonly seen on bicycle locks, computer locks, and a variety of coin-operated devices such as vending machines and coin-operated washing machines.

Security

Tubular pin tumbler locks are generally considered to be safer and more resistant to picking than standard locks, though there are several ways to open them without a key. Even though the pins are exposed, making them superficially easier to pick, they are designed such that after all pins are manipulated to their shear line, once the plug is rotated 1/6 to 1/8 around, the pins will fall into the next pin’s hole, requiring re-picking to continue. As such, picking the lock without using a device to hold its pins in place once they reach their shear line requires over a dozen complete picks to unlock and relock.

Such locks can be picked by a special tubular lock pick with a minimum of effort in very little time; it is also possible to defeat them by drilling with a special “hole saw” drill bit. Standard tubular lock drill bit sizes are .375″ (9.53 mm) diameter and .394″ (10 mm) diameter.[1] To prevent drilling, many tubular locks have a middle pin made of hardened steel, or contain a ball bearing in the middle pin.

In 2004, videos circulating on the Internet demonstrated that some tubular pin tumbler locks could be easily opened with the shaft of an inexpensive ballpoint pen (e.g. BIC brand) of matching diameter. Trade website BikeBiz.com revealed that the weaknesses of the tubular pin tumbler mechanism had first been described in 1992 by UK journalist John Stuart Clark (see Kryptonite lock).

• Leave a comment... (0)

In computer science, conservative two-phase locking (C2PL) is a locking method used in DBMS and relational databases.

Conservative 2PL prevents deadlocks.

The difference between 2PL and C2PL is that C2PL’s transactions obtain all the locks they need before the transactions begin. This is to ensure that a transaction that already holds some locks will not block waiting for other locks.

In heavy lock contention, C2PL reduces the time locks are held on average, relative to 2PL and Strict 2PL, because transactions that hold locks are never blocked.

In light lock contention, C2PL holds more locks than is necessary, because it is hard to tell what locks will be needed in the future, thus leads to higher overhead.

Also, a transaction will not even obtain any locks if it cannot obtain all the locks it needs in its initial request. Furthermore, each transaction needs to declare its read and write set (data items to be read/written during transaction), which is not always possible. Because of these limitations, C2PL is not used very frequently.

• Leave a comment... (0)

Fourteen Locks is a series of locks on the Crumlin arm of the Monmouthshire Canal at Rogerstone in Newport, South Wales. Widely regarded as Britain’s most remarkable staircase lock system , the canal level was raised 160 ft (50 m) in just 800 yd (740 m). Only the top lock is currently in water. The rest of the flight is part of a restoration programme.

• Leave a comment... (0)

An electronic lock (also known as a digital lock) is a locking device which uses some form of electronics to authenticate those accessing it, sometimes using two-factor authentication. Electronic locks are typically considered more secure than conventional mechanical locks and can include additional features like logging access attempts, group level access, time-based access and the incorporation of burglar or fire alarms.

Operation

Most electronic locks use a magnetic lock/solenoid bolt to perform the physical component of locking. Older mechanisms can also be found which use electric motors to move a deadbolt. Once the authentication process is successful, the lock is released into opening.

As providing electrical current to a lock within a door can be difficult, a common solution is an electronic strike plate. Using a normal mechanical lock, an electronic striker can also be triggered remotely to free the latch from the door frame.

Authentication methods

Electronic locks offer a variety of means of authentication; those described below are not considered exhaustive.

Numerical codes, passwords and passphrases

Perhaps the most prevalent form of electronic lock is that using a numerical code for authentication; the correct code must be entered in order for the lock to deactivate. Such locks typically provide a keypad, and some feature an audible response to each press. Combination lengths are usually between 4 and 6 digits long.

A variation on this design involves the user entering the correct password or passphrase.

Security tokens

Another means of authenticating users is to require them to scan or “swipe” a security token such as a smart card or similar, or to interact a token with the lock. For example, some locks can access stored credentials on a personal digital assistant using infrared data transfer methods.

Biometrics

As biometrics become more and more prominent as a recognized means of positive identification, their use in security systems increases. Some new electronic locks take advantage of technologies such as fingerprint scanning, retinal scanning and iris scanning, and voiceprint identification to authenticate users.

• Leave a comment... (0)

A carpet bag is a traveling bag made of carpet, commonly from an oriental rug, ranging in size from a small purse to a large duffel bag.

Such bags were popular in the United States and Europe during the 19th century. They are still made to this day, typically as women’s decorative small luggage and purses, although typically no longer out of old carpets.

The carpetbaggers of the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War were given their name from this type of luggage which they carried.

From the Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886
“The old-fashioned carpet bag (Fig. 1) is still unsurpassed by any, where rough wear is the principal thing to be studied. Such a bag, if constructed of good Brussels carpeting and unquestionable workmanship, will last a lifetime, provided always that a substantial frame is used.”

Carpet bags sometimes also served the dual use as a “railway rug”, a common item in the 19th century to keep warm in drafty and unheated rail-cars. The rug could either be opened as a blanket, or latched up on the sides as a dual purpose traveling bag. From Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879): “… my railway-rug, which, being also in the form of a bag, made me a double castle for cold nights.”

• Leave a comment... (0)

A rotary combination lock is a lock commonly used to secure safes and as an unkeyed padlock mechanism. This type of locking mechanism consists of a single dial which must be rotated left and right in a certain combination in order to open the lock.

Contained inside the mechanism are discs, usually three, with notches that must be aligned to allow for a release of the piece holding the lock in place, and the lock to open. The position of the discs are manipulated by turning the dial left and right; on the dial is a catch - a sort of nub - and on each side of the discs is also a small catch. As the dial rotates, there will not be enough space for the catch on the dial to pass the catch on that side of the disc, and so the disc will begin to rotate with the dial. As this disc rotates, its catch will in turn begin rotating the next disc in a similar fashion. Once all discs and the dial are rotating together, the dial is rotated until the last disc is in place and the notch is in the proper positioning, then by rotating the dial in the other direction, the catches will all disconnect, starting from the dial to the first disc and so on until they connect from the other side and the discs begin to rotate together by the same method but in the opposite direction. In this way, the remaining discs are able to rotate and change their position without further disturbing the last disc. The process is completed back and forth until all discs are in place, and the lock is released.

• Leave a comment... (0)

A guerite is a type of sentry box. Taken directly from the French, the word signifies a projecting turret for a sentry, as at the acute angle of a bastion. In Spanish it is a garita.

Garitas as Inspection Stations

• More than 30 garitas are operated by the Mexican Federal Government as part of its border control program.

• Leave a comment... (0)