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Merry Christmas Eve! CNET social-media expert Caroline McCarthy joins us on this 404 Podcast Yuletide episode where we're wrapping up the year in tech.

The Apple iPad dominated our most-wanted list for the year, but 2010 was a huge year for technology as a whole. From mobile location check-in apps like Foursquare to on-demand video and wireless set-top boxes to motion-control video games and e-books, join us as we recap our personal favorites and reveal what we're looking forward to the most in 2011!

Kenley is back on The 404 today to announce the winner of our Nerd of the Year contest, and Stupid Andy is the victor!

Stupid Andy is a closet geek, so even though you might mistake him for a regular guy, he's well versed in audio/visual languages which I think puts him in the category of nerd, according to this article comparing the two.

Time has announced its Person of the Year for 2010, and although Justin Bieber, the Chilean miners, and the Tea Party all came close, Mark Zuckerberg clinched the title of the person who Time describes as "for better or for worse...has done the most to influence the events of the year."

With Zuckerberg in the cockpit, Facebook has changed the way we communicate and consume news, but we have to question whether the release of "The Social Network" had anything to do with the nomination.

Plenty of Gawker accounts were compromised as a result of last weekend's Gnosis breach, and we learn on today's show that even some of our fellow CNET colleagues were affected by the hack! 

We also take a look at a graph of the top 50 Gawker Media passwords that are now posted online for public consumption. Clearly people just don't care about their commenting passwords on the site, because the first 10 are all lazy keyboard strokes  like "123456," "abc123," and "qwerty." On the stranger side, "monkey," "consumer," "superman," and just the number "0" were all identified as popular passwords.

In the face of disaster, the smart thing to do is adapt and move on, so check out this Lifehacker guide to reassessing your online security measures. The page suggests using a free password manager called LastPass that generates complex passwords for you, stores them on a network, and even audits them to make sure they're not easy to guess.

Narcs around the world have been waiting for a Big Brother app for the iPhone, and now it's here. It's called the PatriotApp, and it deputizes any iPhone user (pending a 99-cent fee) with the ability to report a number of crimes directly to the appropriate governmental agency. It links your iPhone to organizations like the FBI, the EPA, and the CDC so you can report things like government waste, environmental crimes, white-collar crimes, and public health concerns on the fly, but it just seems like a professional tool to snitch on your neighbor. Finally, you can also use the app to post your claims to Twitter and Facebook, so all your friends can be aware of your citizen's arrests.

Remember Daniel, our friend who visited The 404 studio last March? He left us this video voice mail telling us about the current fashion trends blanketing his middle school. Congratulations on your graduation, buddy--be sure to tell all your new high school friends about The 404!

A recent frenzy of storage acquisitions--with 3PAR going to HP, Isilon to EMC, and now Compellent to Dell--brings storage full-circle. Your next enterprise storage purchase? Almost guaranteed to be from a leviathan.

One of the once-amazing changes in the computer business was the birth of independent storage vendors. For decades there've been a few odd after-market and third-party storage vendors. But they were mere pilot fish congregating around the truly big, important swimmers: systems vendors. When you bought storage, it generally came from the same company that made your computer. That was the natural order.

But in the 1990s, … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed from our readers. This week we have questions on MacBook fans spinning at very high speeds when using an external monitor, how to automatically mount a NAS volume at start-up, Safari not understanding certain link types, and options for using Zune media players with OS X. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present a few here, we certainly welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your suggestions in the comments.

Question: MacBook Fans spinning high

MacFixIt reader "Ian" asks:

The … Read more

If you like the MediaShare NAS server but are discouraged by its rather large size and heavy weight, there's now an alternative. Verbatim announced today the mini version of the home NAS server, aptly called MediaShare Mini Sharing Station, that's just about one-third the size of the MediaShare.

Unlike the MediaShare that comes with built-in storage, the MediaShare Mini manages to stay "mini" by offering only four USB ports, into which you can plug USB external hard drives and turn them into the storage space of the home network storage system. This makes it very similar … Read more

For years, storage vendors have been offering two types of disk storage: block and file. Block-based storage is commonly associated with SANs (storage area networks) while-file based storage is commonly referred to a NAS (network attached storage) and attached to Ethernet networks.

Lately, the vendors of either flavor have developed an interest in selling storage arrays that swing both ways--a storage system that provides both block and file access simultaneously. The moniker for these converged SAN/NAS systems is "unified storage."

With unified storage arrays, block access is accomplished through use of an interface to the array such … Read more

For years, storage manufacturers have been trying to get consumers to consolidate their digital media onto network attached storage (NAS) devices. I'm no mind scientist, but I'm guessing adoption by your average consumer is slow because "network attached storage devices" just sound complicated.

Also, collecting all your scattered content across CD, DVDs, external hard drives, and multiple computers is a total pain in the hassle, and anyone who's used a consumer NAS knows that transfer speeds can be dreadfully slow. Western Digital's solution to all this is the My Book Live (not sure how … Read more

This is an update of a deal I posted a couple months back.

The CloudEngines Pogoplug is a nifty little gizmo that turns ordinary USB hard drives into network-attached storage. And not just network-attached, but also Web-accessible. And phone-accessible. The key word here is "accessible."

It originally sold for $129, but the second-generation Pogoplug is on sale at Buy.com for just $43.99 shipped. Thankfully, it's the gray model, not that eye-burning pink one I originally wrote about.

Here's how it works: you connect up to four USB hard drives to the Pogoplug, then plug … Read more

A few months ago, Seagate unveiled its, and probably the world's, first single-volume 3TB external hard drive, the FreeAgent GoFlex Desk. It was just a matter of time before the new super-high-capacity hard drives became available to the company's flagship NAS server, the BlackArmor 440 and BlackArmor 420.

And that day is today, as the company introduced the highest-capacity four-bay NAS server on the market by starting to sell the new BlackArmor 440 and 420 NAS servers preloaded with its 3TB hard drives. These two NAS server are essential the same, except the 440 is preloaded with four hard drives (12TB total), while the 420 is preloaded with only two drives (6TB total).

Apart from the new internal hard drives, the servers themselves are the same as those released more than a year ago. However, they come with the latest firmware to support the internal hard drives' high capacity.

According to Seagate, owners of existing BlackArmor NAS servers can also upgrade to the latest firmware. However, they will not be able to upgrade to the new capacity as Seagate is not selling the 3TB internal hard drives separately. This is because most computers are unable to handle hard drives that have more than 2.1TB of storage due to some legacy standard set back in 1980.

That said, the new BlackArmor 440/420 servers and the GoFlex Desk are the only ways for now for users to benefit from Seagate's 3TB hard drives. So for those looking for a workhorse four-bay NAS server with maximum amount of storage available, the BlackArmor 440 is currently the only choice on the market. … Read more