Whether you make both companies aware is a personal choice. I only worked with companies who had absolutely nothing to do with one-another, ensuring they were in different industries. I also always made sure that any contracts I signed were vetted and that I was in the clear.
For me personally, I always made it clear that my time belonged to me and that I had other things going on. I set realistic expectations based on my compensation and met those expectations. It was never a problem for me. That would sometimes mean that I was working 20 hour days if there was a crunch or emergency at both places, but that was also generally followed by ample time off.
Absolutely. My wife was recently diagnosed as on the spectrum and it's been life-changing for her. It has also help those of us that are close to her to better understand her as a person.
As long as AMD can make a card that is ballpark competative with nVidia on price/performance, I'll buy AMD. nVidia drivers, at least in my experience, have been pretty awful for awhile now. I hot-swap displays daily on a 7970 rig with no issues. I am terrified to swap the hdmi or dvi cables on my GTX 980 because it will completely screw up the display config and I'll spend an hour fixing it. Both rigs are due for upgrades, and we'll be going with AMD for both. nVidia just isn't good enough on any level for me to support this kind of tactic.
I went from never soldering circuitry or working with a schematic to designing a PCB (the CMIO schematics are freely available and easy to reverse engineer even for someone with very limited knowledge), having it printed, and build it myself using 0603 and 0805 SMD components.
It's really not that hard or expensive to do it yourself, and it's a fun little side project. Try it out.
And then it stops being free? I'm no longer a student anyway. Regardless, the damn thing is still proprietary. Authoring tools should not be proprietary. I want to access my data 50 years from now. Depending on a proprietary authoring tool virtually ensures I won't be able to.
I'm just getting into PCB design as a hobby and I agree with the sentiment about KiCAD. I love open source, and I support open source, but KiCAD is a mess. I watched a half hour video they put out recently to try to understand why it's so bad, and I boil it down to these guys develop in a vacuum and they don't really understand HCI/interactive design. At all.
They understand PCB design, but they do not understand software design at all.
I wish Altium had a more accessible license for hobbyists because it's amazing. I'll have to check out DipTrace.
For me personally, I always made it clear that my time belonged to me and that I had other things going on. I set realistic expectations based on my compensation and met those expectations. It was never a problem for me. That would sometimes mean that I was working 20 hour days if there was a crunch or emergency at both places, but that was also generally followed by ample time off.