Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

This is more or less a reminder for me, most of you will probably already know how to do it...

1. Install QEMU:
   apt-get install qemu
2. Create a (resizable) image which will hold Windows XP. The installer chokes if the image is smaller than 1.2 GB or so, but that's not too much of a problem; the "qcow" image format will only take up as much space as is really needed, so the image will be very small in the beginning (not 1.2 GB big!).
   qemu-img create -f qcow /path/to/xp.cow 1300M
3. Insert the install CD, and install Windows in the QEMU image:
   qemu -hda /path/to/xp.cow -boot d -cdrom /dev/cdrom -m 384 -localtime

4. Wait.
5. After the install has finished, shut down the QEMU/Windows; from now on you can boot it (without having to insert the CD anymore) with:
   qemu -hda /path/to/xp.cow -boot c -m 384 -localtime -k de -usb

Type "qemu -h" for more options.

I'm rich! I won the lottery this weekend! I won 8.70 Euros in total... Of course I went out to spend the huge amounts of money I now possess on some ultimately useless gadget.

I got myself a Genie 1693 PDA thing. Which costs 13 Euros. Next time I'll have to win more money ;)

Anyways, the gadget has 384 KB of memory, a touchscreen, and a serial cable to connect it to a computer. Let's see if I can come up with something interesting to do with this thing (suggestions welcome). I was thinking in the direction of putting my own software on it (I don't think that'll work) or reverse engineering the communication protocol or whatever comes to my mind when I'm bored...

John Musser has a list of contests where you can win money by coding. Nice way to get some more pocket money, I'd say...

I also like his final remark in that blog post:

Life is short, code wisely.