This is the page for all those annoying, niggly questions that frequently (or not so frequently) pop up. Maybe the answers are here too.
Mainly with a text editor, and a few other tools. The older graphics were produced using Paint Shop Pro, although this has now been switched to a new system with Kate, Gimp, Hugin and Inkscape running on Mandriva linux. The photos are a mixture of standard 35mm, Lomo 4-way 35mm and digital. There are also some custom tools using perl and java used to ease the administration but nothing runs on the server side. The site should be viewable by any recent, standards-compliant browser, although any bug reports would be gratefully received.
The java bits (in the puzzles and games section) were created originally with a text editor and JDK1.3, and more recently with eclipse with JDK1.4, and should run in most modern browsers. It may help to install a Java Plug-in (available from Sun) rather than using the default java implementation supplied in the browser. Again, if you have problems please tell us.
There are 3d plots both for hikes and for ski resorts, and are all made in the same way. First of all a handheld GPS (from Garmin) is used to record the route. Then the route is read in to the PC using the program Prune which can also edit and process the data, before displaying with Java 3D or Povray. Finally, gimp is used to annotate the image to make the final jpg. The resort plots in the snowboarding section are made in exactly the same way, and the slope charts for each resort are made by reading in the same text file but outputting to standard java AWT classes instead of Java 3D.
The Kmz files for Google Earth are made from the same data, again using the program Prune. This exports the GPS data as a Kml file, which can then be loaded into Google Earth, the snapshots are recorded along with descriptions and then the file is saved from there as a Kmz.
The icon on the home page 
offers a small text file for download called an RSS feed. This contains snippets of information about updates to the Activity Workshop and lets you see at a glance what's new, just by refreshing this small file. You can use a variety of applications to use this file, for example Mozilla Thunderbird, or you can use online services like bloglines or Google Reader. You can subscribe to many other website feeds in the same way. Then you can quickly get an overview of new features here and get linked right to the new stuff.
A cookie is a small bit of text which is stored on your computer by the web page. Depending on your browser's settings, the browser may first ask your permission before doing this, so you may receive a warning message. If you wish, you can change the settings so that cookies are automatically accepted or automatically refused, so avoiding the warning messages.
The Activity Workshop uses cookies in two places, but in both cases, the cookie is only used by your computer, and is not tracked or monitored by the web server. The first cookie stores which news items you have already seen on the home page. This way, when you visit the same page again, it can show you only the stuff which is new since your last visit. The second cookie is stored when you complete a nonogram puzzle, so that your computer can remember which ones you have solved and which ones you haven't. Again, this information is not used by any computer other than your own. Also note that if you have disabled javascript in your browser, the pages will not be able to store or read the cookies.
Since the adverts were reintroduced to this website there may also be cookies being stored from the advert server, these are out of our control and are neither stored nor read by the activityworkshop.
Easy. Write an email and send it to mail@activityworkshop.net. It would help if the subject line has something to do with the website though, to help your mail stand out from the mountain of spam.
The ActivityWorkshop can be found online at activityworkshop.net. If you're viewing an offline copy of this website, it's of course possible that the online version has moved - if so, and if you're not redirected from the above URL, then use whichever search engine is currently most fashionable to hunt for "Activity Workshop".
No. If this website recommends a hotel, or a gliding centre, or a GPS receiver, or anything else - it's definitely not because of freebies. We neither solicit nor accept free stuff or free services, and don't get cheap hotel rates or anything like that. We pay normal rates just like you and don't announce that we're reviewing on behalf of a website.
To cover expenses we have recently added text adverts to the site, in a limited way. Time will tell whether this is a way to contribute to the hosting costs or not.
Because you didn't come here for funny links, did you? And anyway, you probably know where stuff like the Onion, the Register, rathergood and xkcd are already.
First of all, these virus emails fake the sender adress, so the email did not really come from the ActivityWorkshop. What probably happened is that somewhere a computer has been infected with a virus or worm, and that computer has the ActivityWorkshop email address stored on the machine, maybe on a stored web page or in an email. So when the virus or worm transmits itself by email, it picks an address from those stored on the infected machine, and that can possibly be the ActivityWorkshop address. That doesn't mean that the ActivityWorkshop machines have a virus, or that they sent the email.
Protecting yourself against such infections is straightforward:
Again, these abusive emails are not coming from the ActivityWorkshop. We never send unsolicited bulk emails and certainly do not have any interest in promoting stock purchases. Believe me, the bounced replies from failed emails are just as annoying for us as for the unhappy recipient. The spammers appear to be simply faking the sender address, currently random four- or five-character user names at this domain. Unfortunately there's very little we can do about it, because the mails don't come from here.
It depends a little bit on the season, but the puzzles, in particular the nonograms, tend to dominate. Hiking, especially in Switzerland, is also popular, especially in the summer. You can see the charts graphically for a few selected months below thanks to webalizer, filelight and Gimp.
As shown in the June charts, the hiking gets a noticeable boost in the summer, at the expense of the indoor puzzles and the snowboarding. Obviously in the Winter, snowboarding is more popular, reaching 10% in December but sinking back to below 5% in the summer months. The clear favourites are still the Swiss day hikes (24%) and the APR (13%), and the nonograms (15%), with the sudokus on a decline. Together, puzzles & games and hiking make up between half and two thirds of the total hits. The big change in 2008 is the explosion of Prune, from 1% in 2007 to 8% in March 2008. Also the new GPS section has proved popular, overtaking lacrosse to reach 8% in December 2008. On the other hand, the new linux section struggled to break 1% in 2008.
In 2009, the Prune explosion continues, rising to 12%, and the linux section gets a healthy 9% foothold. These come at the expense of puzzles & games, which shrinks to just 17%, its lowest ever figure. In particular the sudoku and xsudoku have dropped almost completely from the radar. And also hiking drops to 30% despite the coming Spring weather.