I keep every single message I've gotten since 1993 in the same inbox with perhaps a half dozen total messages segregated into a different folder. That's around 300,000 emails. I have a very good memory so I seldom need to search, but when I do, I've never found a weakness in the search component of any mail client I care to name, even going back to elm or pine.
The greatest degree of flexibility comes with having all my messages in the same directory; over the last 20 years I've treated it as a quasi-journal and usually if I go back to read a message or two for a given date I can give a pretty accurate summation of everything else I did on that day, so as an organizational structure I'd say it works just fine.

There's an official Gmail client for iOS if you really, REALLY need push updates.
Does the iOS mail client not do IMAP push?

I don't understand the problem either. Gmail works fine with any IMAP client I care to configure. IMAP itself has some weirdness around how clients interact with various folders, but that's not Gmail's fault.

I really don't like Gmail because of a distaste for threaded comment view (yes, I know I can turn it off on the web, but not in the Android client), but as someone who has every non-spam e-mail I've received since 1993 sitting in my inbox I can say that it performs just fine in spite of that and I can access it anywhere, which is the biggest single reason to stick with it.

You're not going to build a 5W ARM system with two or four hot-swap SATA drive bays in a decent enclosure with a decent transformer using new parts for less than what baby Synology NAS costs. I'm fully capable of assembling that sort of system but I can't do it cheaper, especially not if my time has value.

I re-sell NAS systems based on the idea that no on in an SMB setting is interested or even capable of dealing with a fully functional file server. To the folks in the office, the NAS is just "The network drive", while the guy who set it up probably isn't going to give it another thought until he hears that it's not working AND someone is offering to pay to get it fixed.

I also see a lot of NAS systems deployed as workarounds for dealing with slow IT staff response times, often because a manager someplace doesn't understand why it's so much of a hassle for a storage admin someplace to allocate 6TB of space than it is to buy a low end Drobo and some crappy desktop drives. Staff IT might not even be aware that the boxes are out there.

Being able to be disinterested is in fact part of the sales pitch for a NAS in the first place.

I could walk in to the Dunes National Park in something under five minutes from where I'm sitting right now. It's very pretty here. That does not solve the problem of the people who live here, the anti-intellectual regressives who run the state or their steadfast determination to never let anything get any better. College educated people by and large leave and it's for very good reason. This is a terrible place and it is devoid of worth.

My degree is from Purdue and I stand by my assessment. Including the part about the nuke.

My current roommate just moved from Fort Wayne and is in fact a stripper. There are 11 clubs there and girls - even the ones who know what they're doing, can't possibly make decent money just because of oversupply. I have no idea how that place supports so damned many.
(And for the record: She's cute and can dance but her teeth are awful. She talks about braces the way other dancers talk about boob jobs)

I also had no idea that anything even remotely geeky happened in Indiana, let alone in Fort Wayne. This place is a sucking vortex of sister fucking and bible thumping and if some form of nuclear device were detonated over the state I daresay it would make the world a better place.

In point of fact, the Modern Interface doesn't even have a file manager or cut/copy/paste support. This is entirely irrelevant since I have yet to see any user make even a single effort to use even a single modern-style app other than the PC settings stuff. Ignoring the Modern Interface is definitely part of the standard operating procedure for dealing with Win 8(.1).

I suspect the interface will ultimately get better and more smoothly integrated with time. Right now I don't particularly care. It's just software on the machines that doesn't get used, something that it has in common with every OS released in the last 35 years.

Honestly, it's fine. I rolled out 8 (plus Classic Shell) to about 150 systems and they've been trouble free. My power users like to whine about having to go look for that's now split between Control Panel and the Settings modern app, but power users always whine about things and I don't care. For every person who moans about something that moved, I have at least one compliment about how fast their computer seems now. My less-experienced users actually do pretty well with the start screen that puts the three or four applications they're supposed to be using in a nice, huge tile right in front of their face.

Many Samsung devices have split window support. Samsung devices arguably have a better implementation than Windows RT since each window can be resized by an arbitrary amount, rather than the fixed values available in Modern ("Metro") style Windows apps. I'll be overjoyed when I can use that technology on non-Samsung Android devices, but it's definitely useful on my phone.

Steam has an offline mode, but games can only be accessed if you at least occasionally authenticate with Steam. How often is occasionally? Well, in my mind, any number of times more than "the day that the game was purchased" is too many, but I know that if someone's internet connection is down and they haven't authenticated with the Steam client in the last couple months, games won't start.

As far as I can tell, "Offline Model" just stops all the non-authentication aspects of the Steam client, like the built-in chat service, but games that need to authenticate still need to do so occasionally. The last time I gave Steam a chance, I tried to play Dragon Age: Origins while my internet connection was down and found that despite the fact that I was "offline" and had logged in to the game client sometime before I lost my internet connection, the game wouldn't load.

And that was the point where I said fuck it, I'll just buy everything else from GoG or get it from Pirate Release groups.

You can also run DOSbox for Android and boot Windows 95/98 right now. That might sound perverse, but it does provide decent enough binary compatibility to get Office XP running with support for modern MS Office document formats through the compatibility pack and to run the ever popular VB6 apps that seem to be the standard for discussion in this thread.

I buy several hundred drives a year and I've consistently had more problems with all non-Enterprise Western Digital product lines than with I had with Seagate, Hitachi or Samsung models. By rough order of preference, I found WD "Blue" drives least reliable, followed by WD Green, followed by Seagate Eco models, followed by WD Black. The most trouble free drives over the last five years or so? Samsung's F-series and Hitachi DeskStars. Goddammitsomuch.

The current "Green" drives from WD and Seagate already create nothing but problems for certain workloads, but they're extremely appealing for one-off modest-density needs that are probably appropriate to most consumer applications.