Chris Worfolk's Blog

If you find your screen resolution suddenly drops too 800×600 on Ubuntu 12.04, the following set of commands may help you resolve it. First, stop the graphical environment.

sudo service lightdm stop

Now remove all the Nvidia packages and reboot the system.

sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
sudo reboot

This will reset you to the default video driver. You now need to reinstall the Nvidia driver, which you can do by going to System settings > Additional Drivers and selecting the top option with the following name.

NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernal module and VPDAU library

Select this and click activate. Now reboot your system again and the Nvidia drivers will be re-installed and hopefully working again.

Last week at Atheist Society, Heini presented a talk entitled “Disproving God With Philosophy”.

For the March meeting of the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire, Jim Hatfield presented a talk entitled “Good and Evil in the Gospel Myth”.

Recently, Leeds Engage hosted Andrew Copson, chief executive of the British Humanist Association. It was a good talk, as we would expect from Andrew, though it would have been nice to see more people there – I don’t think Leeds Engage spoke to Atheist Society as they had 25 people at an attend the night before, and only a few of us turned up to this.

Can a restaurant that only serves chicken and lamb produced a mixed grill? Yes, apparently they can.

While dining at Home Town Chinese Restaurant, we were going to order two soups, but the waiter recommended one would be enough. No wonder – I don’t think I could have finished that as a main course!

Last week, someone called Aston Merrygold came to visit the office. Apparently he is a member of the band JLS and is on Got To Dance, which I understand is a TV show. I might not have been too fussed, but apparently lots of people were.

My suggestion that we should get some guest scientists in didn’t seem to be a popular suggestion.

If you’ve tried to switch to a different Nvidia graphics driver on Ubuntu and suddenly found that X / Gnome will no longer load and all you have is a command line, you can fix it by switching back to the original driver.

jockey-text -l
jockey-text -e xorg:nvidia_current

These commands will show you a list of drivers available, and then activate the standard Nvidia driver.

The panorama function on my phone does not produce flattering results.

The Simpsons has entertained the world for a quarter of a century. Star Trek has become one of the biggest cultural phenomenons of the 20th century. But there is one TV franchise that has arguably eclipsed them all. That franchise, is Miami Vice creator Dick Wolf’s Law & Order.

While other glitzy shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation focused on solving exciting crimes and interpersonal relationships, one man had the vision to predict that what people really wanted, was a show about the paperwork, procedure and bureaucracy of the justice system.

It’s interesting then, that so many people may not have heard of Law & Order, even fewer will have watched an episode – at least in comparison to The Simpsons, which everyone ever has seen.

But the figures don’t lie. In terms of longevity, Law & Order has provided a staying power that is arguable unmatched by anything else the TV studies of the United States have ever produced.

The Simpsons has produced 24 seasons, with no spin off shows. Even if you throw in Futurama, that only takes them to 28.

Star Trek produced three original series, seven of The Next Generation, seven of Deep Space Nine, seven of Voyager and five of Enterprise, as well as one animated series – giving them a total of 30.

Meanwhile, the Law & Order franchise has produced…

• Law & Order (20 series)
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (14 series and counting)
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent (10 series)
• Law & Order: Trial by Jury (1 series)
• Law & Order: LA (1 series)

That makes a total of 46 seasons, with SVU still going, and that isn’t counting Law & Order: UK which has been going since 2009, and similar versions in Paris and Moscow as well.