What will happen in 2010? It beats us, but we made some guesses anyway. (Courtesy ©iStockphoto.com/jgroup)

It’s the last day of 2009 and I’m sitting in the unusually quiet headquarters of HowStuffWorks.com. There’s a skeleton crew here at the office. The bubbling beakers have been cleared away, our steam-powered automatons sit lifelessly in the back corner and our Zoltar Fortune Telling Machine keeps telling me that I will meet a mysterious woman carrying a Google phone at CES next week. I believe it’s time to wrap up the year with a summary of the last two episodes of TechStuff for 2009.

On Monday, we published our show about the U.S. military’s purchase of more than 2,000 PS3 video game consoles. It’s not because soldiers enjoy playing Final Fantasy. It’s because of the Cell microprocessor the PS3 uses. The architecture of the Cell processor makes it ideal for handling large parallel problems. A parallel problem is one that can be broken into multiple steps, each of which can be solved independently of the other steps. Chris and I talk about how the Cell processor is able to do this and how it’s not the best solution for every type of computational problem. We also talk about how you can turn your own PS3 into a Linux-based machine. We owe thanks to a few listeners who have informed us that Sony disabled the Linux option on the PS3 Slim.

Wednesday’s episode marks one of my favorite times of the year. It’s when Chris and I pretend to be fortune tellers like Zoltar. We prognosticate and give you our predictions for what will happen in technology in 2010. We do this knowing that the year will be filled with surprises that neither of us could have anticipated. That doesn’t stop us from making some educated guesses about what’s to come. At the end of 2010, we’ll see how accurate our guesses turned out to be. Will Apple finally announce the long-rumored tablet device? Will newspapers dump Web advertising and switch to a subscription-based revenue model? And will we hear anything about the next generation of video game consoles in 2010? You can hear our thoughts on these subjects (and many others) on TechStuff.

Have a happy new year and we’ll see you in 2010!