Children's toy: Elenco's Snap Circuits

Recently my son, the fourth grader, seemed to briefly learn from his school about electricity and basic circuits.  He wanted to re-conduct the same experiment that he did at school at home and asked me to buy basic electronic circuit kits.  I could not deny his request for the electronic circuits because the circuits can lead him to the career of scientists or engineers in the near future.  So, I googled to find out electronic circuits that I can buy.  Some goofy stuff was available at Amazon.co.uk, which seem to look down on modern kids' intelligence.

My ever-googling electronic circuits turned me on Elenco's Snap Circuits (http://www.snapcircuits.net/).  I purchased "Snap Circuits Extreme® Educational 750 Exp" from an European distributor of Elenco.  This circuit kit was simply awesome.  This was not too complicated for kids to handle but was quite challenging.  My kids loved it.  They built some circuits to fly a flying saucer, listening a FM radio channel, make annoying noises and record their voices, by simply following instructions of the manual.

They noticed another kind of electronic toy at Elenco's website - Circuit Rover - and pestered me to buy it.  I purchased two sets of Circuit Rover for them.  My kids could control the rover with the remote controllers, shoot some small dishes, and record their voices in them.  Of course, they loved it.  But, the rover made some noise which annoyed me.

While playing with the electric circuits and the rovers, my kids noticed that something was wrong.  My daughter's rover did not move and some parts of the circuits did not work.  I emailed Elenco, asking how to fix the problems.  Elenco simply sent new parts for the rover and the circuits from the US to Belgium, without asking what happened to the parts.  It was a really amazing after service.
   

Incompatible ink cartridges of Canon named compatible ink cartridges

I have a Canon ink jet printer which was bought in the US.  This has been a quite useful and convenient to use because the printer has functions of WiFi and scanning.  However, I was encountered with a big problem several weeks ago.  My kids used up the ink cartridges that I had purchased in the US.  I went to a Media Markt in Brussels to buy new ink cartridges.  I could not find out the same ink cartridges as I have used for the printer.  I purchased compatible ink cartridges produced by Canon because the box of compatible ink cartridges reads they work for my printer.  However, the compatible cartridges have not worked for my printer.  I emailed Canon about this problem. A Canon representative emailed me saying that the compatible ink cartridges in the European countries do not work for printers purchased in the US.  As a result, I wasted about 60 euro for the incompatible ink cartridges.  I do not understand why Canon has this region restriction policy in ink cartridges.  Then, whenever I move to another region, do I have to buy a new printer?  From now on, I will not buy any Canon applicance.