Be Excellent To Each Other

My Sinclair Speccy wallet is falling apart, time for a replacement. Help me, BeExers, you're my only* hope.

Requirements:

- small and slim, like me
- enough room for up to four cards and a driving licence
- somewhere to put banknotes, but not huge amounts (I rarely carry cash)
- no RFID protection
- relatively cheap

Nice-to-haves:

- a clear window on the outside of the wallet that I can put a pretty picture in, perhaps one of Jem

* not my only hope

Get a phone folio. It’s a wallet and a phone case thing all in one. As long as you don’t mind carrying change about in your pocket it saves a load of space. I carry everything you mentioned above in mine AND MY PHONE, so, yeah, phone folio wubbadubbadubdub, or something.

I don't like the idea of those things at all. Not only does your phone become much thicker and annoying to use but if you lose either your phone or your wallet then you get to lose both at the same time!

I use a Ducti after I saw Grim...'s

yeah, i'd rather not have my highly valuable piece of electronic trickery that contains all of my passwords and other shit in the same place as my identity fraud toolkit.

They seem to have gone out of business

I use a Fossil wallet I bought.. somewhere for cheap. They don't seem to do anything quite like it now, but it's similar to this
https://www.fossil.com/uk/en/products/e ... 3609c.html

It can hold half a dozen cards and a couple of folded notes and it's tiny. Works perfectly for me.

If you Google "minimal wallets" or similar you'll be drowning in suggestions. These things are crazy common on Kickstarter. Some that have caught my eye:
https://dashwallets.com/
https://noduscollection.com/collections ... mpact-card

(Oooh. The way that second one does RFID blocking is very clever. It blocks all bar one card, so you can pay contactless without removing any cards from the wallet. I've wanted that feature for ages.)

I backed these on Kickstarter. Mine is on its way. Soon. Ish.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/625059603/the-micro-wallet-doing-more-with-less

Tyvek is an intriguing and practical material, but I prefer the feel of leather.

My fullsized Fossil wallet had a mini one included with it. I use it if I'm going out (rare) or want to minimize.

I use a Jimi wallet. It does pretty much everything you wanted apart from being able to put a picture in it.

It's small though and just right for me.

Here's a cool idea... why not use any one of the millions of other wallets you've bought since you met me?

Is it clever though? Ignoring the knowledge that RFID crime doesn't exist for a second, surely if you want RFID protection in a wallet it's all or nothing? That's like putting locks on all of the external doors of your house, apart from one, which you leave wide open at all times.

And if you've got more than one contactless card in the wallet, surely RFID protection makes no difference anyway - in that the cards would clash so no-one would be able to read anything anyway?

All too big. And none of them let me put a nice picture of you on the outside

why would you want that

Uh, what?

Forget RFID blocking for crime (I agree, that's not in my threat model either.) This uses the RFID shield to block all cards but one. Hence: no card clash. Whichever card is in the outermost pocket is used for contactless. So you can carry multiple cards that have contactless, but still just boop the entire wallet on payment terminals and it all works.

I probably badly worded that post. I was trying to further highlight how pointless RFID wallets are

As in, if you're the sort of person that wants an RFID protected wallet, surely you'd want ALL cards to be protected otherwise there's no point?

Separately to that, if you have more than one contactless card in the wallet, it doesn't matter whether the wallet is RFID protected or not as - if it's not - card clash will prevent the mythical skimmer from getting anything useful out of it anyway.

//edit: Ah, I see where you're coming from now - so you were saying it's clever because the RFID protection on that wallet allows you to store multiple contactless cards with one being used, making it useful for someone that gives no fucks about RFID protection but has multiple contactless cards...

Finally, we get there

I have my Oyster card and my office entry card in the same train ticket holder wallet thingy. They don't seem to clash in either scenario.

Have I just got lucky, or should they be fine together?

I wear a Tyvek overall at work!

Depends on what flavour of RFID the entry card uses. Given that they work, I'm guessing it's different enough from Oyster that it doesn't matter.

You're being charged for an underground trip every time you enter the office, and your HR rep is wondering how you seem to be clocking into the local tube station in the morning.

Whereas of course credit cards have to all be the same implementation for obvious reasons.

Quite.

I don't know if Oyster and credit cards are the same sort of chip, or if the gates use dual-mode readers. Obviously Oyster is considerably older than widespread adoption of contactless bank cards. I guess you could test this by trying to use your Oyster on a normal payment terminal and seeing if it detects anything.

I'm stuck in a blind rage about the prevalence of snake-oil RFID wallets, couldn't see the wood for the trees

First-gen contactless bank cards apparently transmitted data unencrypted, whereas any after that transmit encrypted - perhaps Oyster is the unencrypted one as arguably that data isn't particularly worrisome if grabbed.

Is there any point in having an Oyster card now you can just use contactless on the tube?

Can't do monthly or annual via contactless card

2 reasons for me.

1) I put business trips on my oyster, and personal trips on my credit card. Made expenses a lot easier when I was self employed.
2) My oyster card is in a small ticket holder with my train ticket and door entry card for work. Means I don't have to get my proper wallet out and pull out a card (or pull outmy phone and wake it up) each time I get to a reader, plus if I lose the ticket holder, it's no big deal and easily fixable.

Ok, but as an infrequent visitor I should just use the balance and hand it back, right?

Infrequent visitor should just pay as you go via your credit card.

Fossil used to do a lovely wallet with a P51 Mustang embossed into it, but foolishly I didn't buy it at the time and now it's discontinued

Err