As usual this Christmas there’s the best part of naff-all on the main channels, so for some real techie viewing it pays to look around the schedules – which is precisely what I’ve done. First, a disclaimer: I have absolutely no idea how good these programmes will be, I’m going in blind with the rest of you. So fingers crossed, here’s some geek content you might not have spotted…

Christmas Eve

Mythbusters covers all sorts of topics, but one stands out on Christmas Eve. The team conduct an investigation into viral videos on the internet, dissecting the content of many famous examples and asking whether viewers should believe everything they see. (13:00, Discovery)

The sprawling Wing Commander games franchise got the big screen treatment in 1999, starring the acting chops of, ahem, Freddie Prinze Jr. Its Wikipedia entry says it “diverged significantly from the established Wing Commander universe, and was a critical and commercial failure.” Set the Sky Plus! (23:35, Sky Movies Family)

Christmas Day

If you have Sky you’ll have been battered round the head with this one for the whole month, but it’s worth including anyway. The film that brought 3D to the masses, and had studios thinking they could slap it onto any film for the rest of the year whether it needed it or not: Avatar. Also in 3D, if you’re one of the seven people in the country with a 3D TV. (15:10 and repeated throughout the week, Sky Movies Premiere/3D)

The tiny Corbett’s back with friends for The One Ronnie, and it’s worth catching for one particular sketch that’s been doing the rounds on YouTube: Ronnie teams up with Harry Enfield to discuss a problem with his BlackBerry. Better than it sounds. (17:10, BBC1)

And deep into the night, set the video for the first episode of Sci-Fi Saved My Life, which takes an irreverent look at the science behind the Terminator films, from real-life cybernetics to secret military robots. (02:00 [morning of the 26th], Discovery Science) On consecutive nights in the same time slot, it also examines The Matrix, Men In Black and Stargate.

Boxing Day

There’s precious little to watch if you’re not a sports fan, so I suggest you nip to your local picture house, load up on popcorn and take your pick from two very different nerd gems.

Tron: Legacy takes the classic (although not actually very good…) original, in which a hacker finds himself digitised inside a mainframe, and updates it with 3D and some startling modern visuals.

But the real techie pleasure is to be had with the quite brilliant Monsters. Former BBC visual effects man Gareth Edwards directed and shot it in Mexico with a permanent cast of two and a crew of only seven people in one van. The titular monsters were added in afterwards by Edwards in his bedroom, using only a laptop, some Adobe software and 3dsMax. That it looks better than most blockbusters is testament to what’s possible with today’s hardware and software.

December 27th

The horrific iPad episode of Modern Family isn’t showing over Christmas, so you can be spared a half-hour of aggressive product placement (”it’s a movie theatre, a library, and a music store all rolled into one awesome… pad!”), but there is one other tech-related episode to catch. In it, the family worry about their gadget obsession, so a challenge is set to see who can stay unplugged the longest. (20:00, Sky 1)

Each half-hour episode of How Does That Work? covers several topics so it might not have much depth, but of some interest are the consecutive looks at the workings of the hard disk drive and the MP3 player. (01:00/01:30 [morning of the 28th], Discovery Science)

December 28th

Part Kinect, part Microsoft Surface, it still looks like too much hard work. The film that hints at the possible future of user interfaces, Minority Report. (14:00, Sky Movies Sci-Fi & Horror)

December 30th

I, Videogame is “a provocative ‘rockumentary’ on the birth of a new form of entertainment,” apparently, with four episodes to catch on consecutive nights. Here’s the quite brilliant synopsis for episode one: “In the 1950s, the Cold War quickly evolved between the world superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. Mutually assured destruction enforced an uneasy stalemate, yet also drove computer technology to create missile simulations in order to predict the results of a nuclear war. This same computer technology was used to develop the first computer game in 1958 – Tennis for Two.” Obviously. (2am [morning of the 31st], Discovery Science)

December 31st

Episode two of I, Videogame looks at the 1980s shift from controlling things, like spaceships and tennis rackets, to controlling recognisable characters with real faces and back stories. And Donkey Kong. (2am [morning of the 1st], Discovery Science)

New Year’s Day

Episode three of I, Videogame looks at the birth of Castle Wolfenstein and Doom, and the move from 2D to 3D. It also looks at the thinly veiled recruitment tool, America’s Army, and has games developers asking “how long before a game was nearly indistinguishable from reality?” Quite long, as it turns out. (2am [morning of the 2nd], Discovery Science)

January 2nd

Episode four of I, Videogame looks at the God game genre, talks to the legend that is Will Wright (Sim City, The Sims), and covers the shift from gamers consuming content to creating it themselves. It also, intriguingly, covers how people used games to find their definition of good and evil after the breakdown of the Cold War. (2am [morning of the 3rd], Discovery Science). For some reason, the fifth and final episode on online gaming is not being shown.

January 3rd

What better way to finish your techie Christmas than by enjoying a festive edition of Mastermind featuring the one and only Sir Clive Sinclair? He’s up against the intellectual might of two actors and a Blue Peter presenter, so he’ll need all the support he can get. (20:20, BBC 1)

Merry Christmas!

I know this not through some astonishing psychic abilities, but because I spent two hours this morning at a Sony briefing. There, Sony confirmed it would be filming 25 matches in 1080p 3D, but don’t expect these to be broadcast on Sky: Sony is using the footage to create “promotional trailers” which you’ll be able to watch at its retail stores.

I also had a quick blast on a 3D game, “enjoyed” a 3D music video, and was distinctly underwhelmed by watching a few minutes of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

Of all those, only the game came anything close to persuading me that 3D TVs have a future in the home. The trouble with films is the limited size of the TVs: even a 40in or 50in TV leaves you with too much peripheral vision, so objects can’t properly envelop you. As soon as they reach the edge of the screen, where they disappear, the 3D “magic” is lost.

Rather more disturbing is the idea that Sony is delving into its back catalogue and 3D-ising classic performances from the likes of Jimi Hendrix. This reminds me of the “colourising” of black and white movies when colour TVs first appeared (not that I was actually alive then, naturally). Once the novelty wore off, most right-thinking people decided the original was better.

This isn’t to say I’m anti-3D. There are some clear benefits to the technology… it’s just that the areas where it excels tend to be in a niche. For example, earlier this year I saw an impressive demo of a 3D projector – the interactive dissection of a frog when viewed in 3D rather than 2D makes a whole lot more sense, and according to a teacher I interviewed made a real difference to the children’s interest.

Likewise, cinema is an obvious candidate for 3D. With one proviso: that it’s done well. I thoroughly enjoyed watching Avatar, which was designed to appear in 3D from conception, but the thought of studios jumping on the 3D bandwagon and 3D-ising the film after it’s been shot is a clear signal (so far as I’m concerned) to do one thing only: not go and see that film.

Games, too, can benefit from being created in 3D. It makes sense in anything where 3D over 2D gives you greater clues to what’s happening, with obvious candidates being shoot ‘em ups and driving games.

But 3D-ready TVs in the home? Sony quoted “industry experts” Future Source Consulting, who predict that, by 2014, 40% of new TVs sold in the UK will offer 3D capabilities.

Sony hopes that march begins tomorrow, with its own range of TVs, Blu-ray players and home cinema systems all going on sale. PS3 owners will also be able to apply a firmware update to allow their systems to support 3D, and four games (WipEout HD, SuperStardust HD, PAIN and Motorstorm Pacific Rift Demo) will take advantage. Note these are only free to people who buy a Sony 3D TV.

Later this year, Sony promises, it will also be producing laptops capable of 3D playback, joining existing offerings such as Acer’s Aspire 5738DZG and Asus’ G51J. But does anyone really care?

I’ve been wrong about new technologies before, and it’s always dangerous to base predictions based on early implementations. Sony says it’s already learned plenty of lessons about how to film sporting events in 3D, and if 3D does take off in the way it’s predicting then the cost will come down as the size and quality of the TVs increase.

But even in this vision of the future, we’ll all have to wear those glasses when we want to watch a 3D film or football match. While early adopters may be willing to suffer this annoyance, until the viewing experience becomes an awful lot better, you’ll have to use negotiation skills worthy of Nobel Peace Prize winners to persuade the rest of your family to don them too.

While researching an upcoming feature, I found a link from the BBC. Entitled “Why 3D is about to break through“, it explains the exciting world of 3D movies and projection, before concluding that it “looks like the future of 3D is firming up.”

Only trouble is, the article was from over a year ago. Since then I’ve been to see Beowulf at the IMAX, and toyed with an old game on one of Zalman’s monitors, but I can hardly say 3D leapt out at me through 2008.

This year, though, is different – one look at the barrage of 3D TVs launched at CES is enough to realise that. But while the industry hypes it, I’m intrigued to know whether you, the consumers, are actually interested in 3D at all. Going to a movie once in a while is one thing, spending your own money on kit is another entirely.

So, is it something you’d consider investing in? And, gaming and movies aside, are there any applications for which you see 3D being genuinely useful?

Stargate Atlantis is rubbish. This is a fact. This one single photo should tell you just how rubbish it is, but if it doesn’t, well, let me tell you: It’s rubbish. Really.

But the real eye-opener is not that people like it, it’s that in 2008 more people downloaded each episode from torrent sites worldwide than watched it on TV in America. While the big shows mentioned above still roped in vastly more TV viewers than downloaders, Stargate Atlantis tipped over the edge.

Why this show? Well, by the look of the various fan sites and forums out there it’s globally popular, but that popularity isn’t necessarily respected by the publishers and networks. Complaints come from New Zealand, Europe, even as close to the US as Canada; there’s a long wait between the show airing in the US and making its way abroad, so it’s inevitable that these fans will look elsewhere for their fix.

The primary reason most TV downloaders do so is not to steal or to fight back at the big corporations, it’s simply that they want to watch a TV show right now and downloading it is usually the easiest way. And it’s an argument I’m increasingly coming round to.

You’ve followed a show for years, complete with intrusive adverts, yet you’re still expected to wait months for it to reach these shores after it’s finished in the US. It’s not only a little insulting, it’s also incredibly frustrating, particularly as spoilers instantly fill the internet for you to avoid as you count down the months till you can watch it legally.

It’s the same with region-locked DVDs. The studios try to control the release across multiple territories to coincide with charm offensives in each region in turn, but the moment the first territory gets it and starts raving about it (usually the US) the rest of the world gets annoyed and just downloads it. And why shouldn’t they?

A few shows have seen the light and changed schedules – 24, Prison Break and several other big names now air over here in close approximation to the US – but as long as others don’t, the industry can have few complaints when people veer towards the path of least resistance: the good old internet, destroyer of all things traditional.

Here are five ways to ensure you’re not stuck watching re-runs of The Vicar of Dibley this Christmas.

1. GET THE ULTIMATE TV GUIDE

The Radio Times might have been good enough to keep you abreast of all the top TV in the days when Channel 4 was considered exotic, but it simply doesn’t cut the mustard now there’s a zillion or two channels on the Sky schedules.

The immensly powerful DigiGuide, on the other hand, will make light work of sorting the unmissable gems from the Jamie Olivers. This Windows application contains listing from over 500 UK television channels, but tailors your listings depending on your particular TV set up (Sky, Freeview or terrestrial) and region, so that you only see the programmes you’ll actually be able to watch.

Shows can be searched for by programme name, genre or even the actors involved. Search for Gavin and Stacey, for example, and you’ll instantly be presented with the time and channel of the Christmas Day special, and all the re-runs of previous series being shown on the various satellite channels over the next few weeks. Shows can be stored as favourites, with desktop alerts every time the show’s about to start, or even SMS alerts to your mobile phone – which are free until the end of the year.

DigiGuide recommends programmes based on your personal tastes, which are established during the painless set-up routine. Not bothered about sport? Sling the slider to the left and the My TV recommendations will omit any mention of the Boxing Day footy. If that seems a bit broad brushstroke, the genre filters allow you to choose which specific sports or types of film you’re interested in, making it easy for cricket-loving horror fans to get a highly-personalised schedule.

DigiGuide costs £14.99 for a year’s subscription, but you can download the full Windows client for a 30-day trial, which will easily see you through the Christmas period.  

2. SET THE SKY+ FROM AFAR

There’s little more annoying than arriving at Gran’s on Boxing Day and realising you forgot to set the Sky+ for the cracking movie on Film Four. Thankfully, Sky+ has a fallback for the absent-minded. Remote Record allows you to set the PVR using an electronic programme guide (EPG) on the Sky website or on your smartphone – check the Sky website for a list of compatible handsets.

If you’re smartphone’s not on the list, you can still set your Sky+ to record a show via text message. Register your Sky account with the service  and type a text message in the following format, including the full stops: Programme title. Channel (name or number). DD/MM. HH:HH

For example: EastEnders. BBC1. 25/12. 20:00

Then send a text to 61759. We’ve heard that the text service can be a little patchy, so opt for the online or smartphone EPG if you can.

3. CATCH UP ON YOUR MOBILE

If you’d rather pluck your toenails out with a teaspoon than sit down with the family to watch Noel’s Christmas Presents, seek sanctuary with your mobile gadgets. The BBC iPlayer is now compatible with a number of mobile devices, allowing you to catch up with most of the TV shows broadcast on the Beeb’s various channels over the past week. 

Officially supported mobiles include the iPhone, Nokia N85 and N96, Samsung Omnia and Sony Ericsson C905. Some enterprising Symbian fans have found a way to gently hack the iPlayer to work on other S60 smartphones – click here for details.

Portable media players including the Creative Zen, Sony Walkman E and S Series, and various Archos devices are also iPlayer compatible, allowing you to load the device up with downloads for those arduous motorway slogs. Make sure you select the “For Media Player” option when downloading shows from the iPlayer website, then simply drag and drop the files on to your media player.

4. TAKE YOUR TV WITH YOU

What happens if you want to watch the Boxing Day clash between Stoke and Man Utd, but are heading off to see family who don’t have Sky? With a couple of handy set-top gadgets, you can take your TV with you.

Devices such as the Slingbox Pro and Sony’s Location Free attach to your TV’s set-top-box, and beam the signal over the internet to a laptop, smartphone or Sony PSP, wherever you may be (as long as you can get a decent internet connection at your destination, of course). See the current issue of PC Pro (with the main cover-line, Netbooks from £115) for an in-depth guide to setting up a Slingbox.

If it’s too late to run down the shops for dedicated hardware, software such as Orb MyTV and WebGuide, used in conjunction with a TV-tuner equipped PC, will allow you to stream live or recorded content over the internet. Alternatively, GoToMyPC will provide remote access to your PC from wherever you are in the world, allowing you to catch up on the latest iPlayer shows even if you’re in normally off-limits foreign climes over Christmas.

5.  SEEK OUT ALTERNATIVES

It’s all well and good having 13,505 channels on Sky and cable, but when most of them are showing round-the-clock re-runs of Frasier and Changing Rooms, it can still leave you yearning for a little variety.

Why not try a few of the more eclectic online alternatives? The recently-revamped Joost is getting into the Christmas spirit with the superb Stressed Eric Nativity, as wide selection of old Laurel and Hardy movies and not an X-Factor winner in sight with a wide selection of indie music videos.

The decidedly edgier Babelgum hosts a selection of indie films, live music performances from bands such as the Kaiser Chiefs and Dizzee Rascal, as well as some classic motorsport documentaries featuring Stirling Moss and James Hunt. You’ll need to download the dedicated player software to watch show, however.

The excellent Miro player, meanwhile, offers a bevy of videos from the NASA archives, a selection of classic clips from the Monty Python team and a quite frightening video of the singer Grace Jones. 

A couple of months ago I wrote a story about how people now routinely surf while watching TV. It seems that 70% of us now split our attention this way, for a variety of reasons; TV shows are generally slow-paced and dull, for one, and the internet lets us research what we see in real-time and add to the experience. Thanks to this unique opportunity we can dig a little deeper to see if this is true.

Between 9pm and 10pm last night – when the show was broadcast – we experienced a jump in traffic of around 1,100 new users. This is down to the fact that my review for the Very PC Treeton is the second result for “Very PC”, the company who kindly plugged us by waving its PC Pro award around, on Google. Clearly, people were searching for the company while watching the presentation.

However, if you assume that most browsers would click on the first link – 90% perhaps – then you only have a figure of 11,000 people “two-timing” their television with their laptops – a tiny percentage of its total viewers.

Mind you, PC manufacturers aren’t going to grab the attention of the average viewer, so perhaps the jury is still out on this one.

Today’s launch (and review) of Nvidia’s latest enthusiast cards staggered me. The GeForce GTX 280 is fast, blisteringly so; but it’s also mind-bendingly, incomprehensibly, ball-achingly expensive. It’s certainly not the first – every new launch seems to have such prices attached – and it won’t be the last. But £430 for a graphics card?

Let me set my stall out right from the outset: I once spent in excess of £300 on a Radeon 9800 Pro with a fancy blue cooler just to play Far Cry in all its glory. Being a student, I had no money and even less sense, but it just seemed like something I had to do – how else would I experience something so beautiful?

A launch like the GTX 280 should be like technological Viagra to me, then, shouldn’t it?

In a word, no. Times have changed; I’ve changed; gaming has changed. And it’s all down to the current generation of consoles. (Praise be to Sony. Amen.)

My gaming sessions go a little like this: I buy a game; put the disc in my Blu-ray drive (an added bonus); I press a button; I wait a few seconds; I enjoy high definition gaming of the highest quality on a 40in television from the comfort of my sofa. Cold beer optional.

Contrast this with the Labs: I install the game; load Crysis; can’t run Crysis; install the latest graphics drivers; load Crysis; can’t run Crysis; install the latest Crysis patch; load Crysis; can’t run Crysis; fiddle with graphics settings; daydream about sofa and PS3; check no one can see me, then cry a little; load Crysis; can’t run Crysis.

Have a break; spend it breathing deeply and thinking of dolphins and flowers and swaying forests of calmness (on my big TV).

Get back to work; lower resolution to a level I last used in 1998 on my 15in CRT; lower settings to Medium, thus defeating the whole point of Crysis; daydream about cold beer; finally get Crysis running; realise Crysis at these settings looks like Far Cry; sob into hands; spend £430 or smash up £1,000 review PC.

Is it any wonder the PC games industry is in decline when a single graphics card can hit the market (to much fanfare and positive reviews) with a price higher than that of an entire PlayStation 3? And the fact that it exists at all means games get more and more demanding and your PC is left playing catch-up.

The only PC game I’ve bought in as long as I can remember is Football Manager. And I think it’s safe to say I don’t need to spend £430 on a graphics card to play that.