My best guess is to use a spray lacquer for enamel, such as this:

https://a.co/d/ixJ7knW

I suspect the “brass” over zinc that is on that clip isn’t just brass - if it were brass plated zinc, I’d be totally comfortable using that spray lacquer over it. Instead, it’s probably some type of brass colored paint (or paint containing actual brass.

This means that you have mystery paint (and mystery “enamel”) that you are trying to coat. Because of that, no matter what top coat you choose, there is a chance it won’t work well and the solvents in the top coat could melt/harm the clip.

But… if I were in your situation, I would try the spray above and cross my fingers.

If you go that route:

Gently dab a bit of rubbing alcohol somewhere that you won’t be too sad if it hurts the finish. Give it a little rub. If it doesn’t mess with the finish, then you’re probably good to use rubbing alcohol to do final cleaning before top coating with lacquer.

Spray a tiny bit of the lacquer on a something (like the corner of a paper towel. immediately rub it on a spot on the clip to do the same type of test. Is the finish ok? Then you’re probably good to proceed.

Before spraying, clean the clip gently but thoroughly with dish soap and water. Rinse well. Dry well.

Give the thing a good rub with a soft cloth and rubbing alcohol to get any other remnants/grease off the clip before painting.

Give the clip a light coat of spray enamel. Follow directions for ambient temperature and recoat time. Give it another coat a bit heavier. Maybe even a third.

Let it dry and cure for a long time. The lacquer will seem completely dry and “done” after a day, but it won’t be fully cured. Giving it time to fully harden before messing with it too much.

Other notes: dust is your enemy. It’ll stick to your top coat while it’s drying. Try to minimize dust and similar nasties.

If you haven’t done used spray cans much, learn to use them first. Do a practice pass on something you don’t care about. It’s really easy to put on too much and have your clearcoat run. No fun.

This person is correct.

I’ve finished, painted, sealed, and repaired enough stuff to know that “maybe try clear nail polish” is a terrible idea for OP.

Nail polish is very hard to get to go on smoothly over a large area and OP is very likely to end up with an uneven or marred finish. If you just put down nail polish, you are not going to get a lasting finish on much of any material without cleaning and degreasing it first.

I would clean/degrease (I don’t know what to use as I can’t tell what the material is). I would lean toward using some type of spray top coat (again, I don’t know which product because I don’t know the material). You still need to know how to spray on finishes, but I find it much easier to do well than brush on finishes.

OBJECTION!

When police think they have right suspect they often do everything they can to prove that person did it. Essentially, once they have their targets set on a suspect, they shift from trying to figure out who may have done it to putting all their resources into finding evidence against the suspect and building the strongest case they can against them. This includes ignoring evidence that is counter to their theory and discontinuing investigation of other leads.

Their goal at that point is to convict. Because, to them, getting a conviction is success and the person going free is failure. Alternately, getting the person to “commit suicide” is success because they can claim that they were guilty and no trial is necessary.

It’s all about winning and getting a conviction because conviction=justice=case closed. And that means the public can rest soundly knowing “justice” has been served. Especially after PR has done their work.

Prosecutors are the same. They treat their job as finding anything and everything to get the conviction. Exculpatory evidence is ignored and buried. If “evidence” is planted/manufactured, they do their best to ignore and hide that fact and make said evidence look real. It’s the defense’s job to prove innocence. In theory, the police should be working to find and provide evidence for both sides, but the police and Prosecutors anre working toward the same goal, leaving the defense severely hindered.

This is the system that railroads people into conviction. They use the media to amplify their story and make it look like they are infallible. When information comes out that counters the police/prosecutor story, they circle the wagons to protect each other and discredit the information that contradicts them. Because they think that they are the good guys and even if they got something wrong, their original hunch must have been right.

Hello, 30-years-ago me. My sister and I had a similar age gap. We had an amazing relationship/friendship throughout our childhood and it was really hard when she left for college. The good news is that we still have an amazing relationship and she is still the best sister I could ever ask for.

It’s a funny thing that when we are young, everything feels so permanent when in reality, your life is changing incredibly quickly. When you get hit by something like this, it’s uncomfortable as fuck to see that reality. Change is hard, but it also leads to and comes along with growth… and growth is good.

I don’t say this to be dismissive of what you are going through, only to say that change happens. It is a part of life that we learn to deal with because it can’t be avoided. What is happening in your life probably hurts. It’s probably scary. The uncertainty sucks. All those feelings are valid.

She will be farther away. You will see her less. She is going to be incredibly busy at times. But she is also there for you and you two will still have each other and have time together.

Of course, I have no guarantees — your life isn’t mine. But for me, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it seemed (it’s easy to imagine the worst). Just like it was awesome having an older sister as your friend while at home, it’s really awesome to have an older sister in college to talk to and visit get to experience bits of that life with.

Wow. I just want to say thank you for such a thoughtful, informed, detailed response. You are an amazing person!

Are you logged in? It appears you can go to the privacy settings page and set some (not all) settings without being logged in.

Thanks. I just went and disabled it. I also found that they had “products and services notifications” turned on. I know I attempted to disable all advertising and monitoring stuff shortly after I signed up, but I can’t say for sure whether I had missed this section at that time or if they kindly turned it on for me between then and now.

I suspect that there is “palm check” turned on for your touchpad. This is designed to keep you from accidentally moving/clicking the touchpad by brushing it with your palm while you are typing.

Look for a “palm check”, “palm rejection”, or “disable touchpad when typing” setting in your touchpad utility. As far as I know, these are all roughly the same thing.

If you look for a “watt meter plug”, you’ll pribably understand what it is at a glance. It’s a device you plug into your wall outlet (or surge protector or whatever). It has a power outlet on it, which you plug your device into, and a screen that shows watts drawn and watt-hours over time. Super simple. I think “Kill A Watt” is the most well known brand.

Agreed. I strongly dislike Elon and think he is a thin skinned trust fund baby who is destroying Tesla and already destroyed Twitter. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out he is using sock accounts to praise himself… but in this article all I see are people making accusations without solid evidence. Yes, it appears he banned the guy accusing him but we already know that Elon will ban his critics whether or not those critics’ accusations are real. There is nothing here showing that the account is anything but one of his braindead fanboys.

It’s one thing to take these accusations and try to find solid evidence. It’s another to treat the accusations as solid evidence itself. Let’s be better than the conspiracy theorists.

Someone bought a pallet of returned products and found this as one of the returned products. So what?

It is important to note that this pretty useless concoction of non-working parts – dressed up as one of the best graphics cards available to consumers in 2024 – wasn’t sold as a new model. It was received by an NWR customer in a pallet deal from Amazon Returns.

…

We can’t know for sure, but the product received by NWR, apparently from an Amazon pallet deal, may have been an Amazon return where a faulty Franken-graphics-card was returned and someone kept a good working one. The outward description of a cracked PCB and melted power connector might even suggest another level of deception used to return this switched product.

I don’t think you understand how spread out rural America is. A lot of areas have tiny grocery stores to support a small population spread over a wide area.

Dunno. My account isn’t on either instance. If beehaw is federated with your instance, you would be able to post.

It looks like foss@beehaw.org is the biggest. Search communities for “foss”

Lol. Yeah, I get it. Plus, on other social media where liking your own stuff isn’t the default,liking your own content feels dirty. So if that’s what your used to, I can see the negative reaction. Especially if you thought it was an app-specific feature and not the global default.

If you’re worried because you feel like the app is trying to promote your post/comment by upvoting it, then don’t worry. This is the default action on lemmy (and Reddit). Essentially every post and comment starts with a score of 1, so that is what people expect.

If you were to find a way to disable this for yourself (or manually remove the vote), I think that your post will get buried because the algorithm “expects” a score of 1 and your post would basically look like it was instantly disliked, receiving worse ranking for anyone browsing by anything but New. Note, I don’t know exactly how the algorithms work, so it’s possible that I am incorrect here. I could also see the algorithm ignoring the OP’s vote and your post ending up in the same position.

Additionally, with a score of 0, people are more likely to skip over it, thinking it’s bad content. Or, even worse, hive-mind downvote it.

Voyager has good features for hiding posts as well as marking posts read and hiding read posts.

You might give the Voyager app a try. It’s what I use. It has a hide post option, as well as a “mark read on scroll” option and a button to hide read posts. I think you have to enable the last two in its settings.

Ah, sorry about that. And thank you! I refreshed the comments before asking you to do that. I’m not sure if I missed your edit or it hadn’t shown up for me yet.