I don't think this is a good idea. You should be grateful that you have a job. There's no guarantee that you will be able to get another one after taking a year off. I say this as someone who has been unemployed for over seven months, and is struggling to pay bills, and buy Christmas presents.
I was at the same company for seven years. It was my first job after college. Don't make the same mistake I made. I am now unemployed, and nobody wants to hire me because my skills are out of date. I have been without a job for so long that I have decided to take out student loans, and enroll in a boot camp. I've had to sell my car to afford this. My life is absolutely miserable right now. Remember, the people you work with are not your friends, they just want to exploit you to make money.
Back when I was in college, I attempted to make my own DIY mini PC. I got an Antec VESA case, and an all-in-one mini-ITX AMD motherboard. It originally had Windows 7 on it, which I later replaced with a lightweight Linux distro. I could play older games like Dragon Age and Mount & Blade pretty well on it. I had to get rid of it, though, when Windows 10 came out. I have thought about replacing my current tower PC with a mini PC again, but have been hesitant to do so, because of financial reasons. Maybe this is a good time to do this?
Depends on what you want. If you're looking for bang for the buck, mini PCs in NUC footprint, with oomph that can play some games too are terrible at that. They'll cost you nearly as much as a budget gaming laptop from Lenovo using the same APU and that come with a screen, keyboard and touchpad as bonus. For value/money, standard ATX size PCs rule.
That makes sense. I also find it hard to justify getting a mini PC when the Steam Deck exists. I'm sure that if this existed back in 2012 when I was in college, I would have just gotten one of these.
It's articles like this that make me love the Internet. I purchased a car several years ago, and asked if they would allow me to finance through my credit union. They said that they don't negotiate with credit unions. I then stormed out of the dealership, and found a used car in their lot that I could afford to buy with cash. It may have been a dick move, but I think it was the right decision.
I have a similar background to you. I am currently a full-time software developer who is very interested in classical music and music theory. I take piano lessons on a weekly basis. It's good to know that there are other like minded individuals out there.
I've spent last two years doing college-level piano studies (pre-conservatiorum, i.e. nominally Year 8-9, was more like Year 4-5 because I lacked any childhood piano background).
Sadly, my program wasn't great in many aspects. A huge portion was devoted to perfecting the playing of pieces by heart (I did some Mozart, some Bach and some Beethoven). While I've learnt a good deal on interpretation, expression and fingering when I meditated on what I'm forced to do, I'd much better spend more time on writing out tons of jazz improvisations using some rules given, learn some idiomatic patterns on a keyboard and the like. So I quit.
Now, for the last seven months I don't have any piano teacher, and I feel so much freedom every time I play the instrument. I don't play anything that I've tried to learn from sheet music. I hate the whole process. Rather, I gradually develop my own improvisations. Not in an intricate and highly restrictive bebop jazz idiom. Rather, something quite tonal and functional, yet with scales, interesting harmonies, stretching the boundaries and the like.
My greatest joy is that I've noticed I subconsciously started building large forms from it, on the spot. I previously lacked enough attention. I feel like I'm an LLM with a loss of my previous listener's experience doing random stuff for many epochs.
I'm curious to hear, what's your request to your teacher, and how happy are you with what are you doing at classes?
My request to my teacher is that he teach pieces that I find interesting. Currently, I am working on pieces by Chopin and Milhaud. I am very satisfied with my classes. I find that they help me to take my mind off of my job, which can be very boring and monotonous at times.
