Tips for Foreign Exchange Parents

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I'm coming up on the halfway mark for this year of sponsoring a student from Norway. For those who stumble across this wondering "was the experience worth it" let me reassure you right away. It's an amazing experience that I wouldn't trade for the world. I was nervous with us being a childless couple in our 30s but it turned out to be a delightful learning experience for both parties. It pushes you out of your comfort zone and make you see your community and routine through new eyes.

One of my frustrations before my student came was how little information was out there. I hope people considering sponsoring a student will find some use in these tips.  I'll continue to edit these as we discover more.

Registering for School Will Take Way Longer Than You Think

I was as surprised by this one as anyone. When we first accepted our I went to local high school and met with a counselor months before I needed to. I filled out a lot of his forms and was told "he's ready to go, just have him come back before school starts and we'll finish it up". Sounds good right?

What followed was a week of us being on the phone or at the school. We learned about the catch-22 of not being able to play in sports until you had a minimum number of course hours. There are questions about what grade he should be in. Every school official you meet is both eager to help and also telling you that you are missing some critical document or item. I provided many of the same documents several times.

All this means expect to spend some time in the school when your student arrives. Make a binder with copies of their important documents.

Have them cook once a week

One of the things I struggled with when our student first came was "what do I have him do". Some of the chores were pretty obvious. We asked him to keep his room clean and when he got home from school to walk the dog. I wanted something that would be more of a learning experience for both of us though. My wife told me about something she did when she was a foreign exchange student that I loved.

Put $100 in a drawer. Tell the student that once a week they need to cook dinner. They can pick the day but they need to go to the store themselves, pick out the items they need, get them home and cook them. It sounds simple but has actually proven to be one of the more useful exercises we've engaged in.

For the student it's a good immersion exercise. They need to plan ahead with a recipe, then go to the store with the limited funds and get the items they need. Finally they need to come home and have dinner ready by roughly the time the family eats.

Homesickness can sneak up on both of you

Homesickness is a constant challenge for foreign exchange students. We were ready for it around the 2-3 month mark. It didn't come though and it seemed like maybe our student just wasn't going to experience it. I chalked it up to social media ensuring he was still in regular contact with friends and family along with a deep passion for watching soccer and talking about it with his dad, a tradition he kept up.

Then the holidays hit. The photos of his family all together at the vacation cabin definitely caused him to experience some of the homesickness we had been ready for months earlier. It caught me off guard. It took me longer then maybe it should have to recognize what was going on and to help him deal with those issues. The point of this is a lot of the literature pounds into you that around 2-3 months they'll experience homesickness. That is by no means a hard and fast rule. Everybody is different.

You need more food

When you live with a partner in your 30s over time you start to mentally adjust sizes. You know how much laundry detergent to buy because you know in the back of your mind roughly how quickly you burn through it. Same with staples like bread and milk. These numbers start to become patterns on buying that you replicate every time you go to the store for grocery shopping. But with a kid you'll likely need a lot more food and it'll need to be easier to prep. I forgot how teenagers do not have things like basic knife skills and so prepping more complex foods is an time consuming process.

So for your first couple weeks keep an eye on what you are buying and what you are running out of. You'll start to develop the new list of things you buy along with the amounts you'll need.

IKEA Kadrilj Review

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IKEA Smart Home: Everything you love and hate about IKEA at once

Living in Denmark usually means I get everything late compared to the US. Movies come out a bit later, technology often isn’t available, etc.

So I delighted to learn (likely due to the extreme proximity between Denmark and Sweden) that I could get some IKEA Kadrilj smart blinds. After setting them up and having them work I have some feelings about the product.

The stuff I like

First IKEA couldn’t have made this process more simple. Out of the box, the Kadrilj blinds come with everything you need. There’s the signal repeater, the up/down button, the battery pack, the micro-USB cord to charge the battery pack and a USB wall plug. The instructions were pretty simple to install the blinds and I was pleased by how there didn’t seem to be any tricks to the installation itself. Working with the up/down button that comes out of the box was great. It was already paired to the signal repeater, so testing that basic functionality was charging up the smart blinds, plug in the repeater and then hit up/down to make them work. They also look quite nice and aren’t very loud which is a nice touch. The price is also excellent for what you get.

Outside of the blinds the IKEA gateway you need to connect the devices to Google Home, Alexa or Homekit is very simple to use. It is an ethernet-only device that only goes out to the internet to check for updates and update its time from NTP. Some people may see this as a downside but TRÅDFRI is pretty secure as far as IoT goes. The device itself is going to get an unencrypted JSON to download a signed file (so unless there is some local DNS hijacking this seems like a great approach). The local communication over your network is UDP but uses DTLS which means the UDP packets are encrypted. The key used for a handshake between devices is on the bottom of the device and seems long enough to be secure. I have a lot of experience with UDP but not that much with DTLS.

Above the networking layer for the gateway, the TRÅDFRI is running CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol) which gives a REST API. In testing with simple scripts written in Python, you have a lot of functionality open to you that isn’t available in the app yet. It’s great to know that in the future if IKEA were to drop support for the device I could still write scripts to manage the device without having to worry about IKEA relying on server-side communication to keep the device working. I also appreciate how IKEA limited themselves out of the gate and gave us something that is designed for years of operation. The device itself is nice looking although it did irritate me that the lights telling you of the status don’t change colors when they are working. Instead “blinking white” means not set up, “steady white” means it is working. I prefer colors to tell me status but this is not critical once you grasp how it works.

If you are interested in exploring the product on your own I found the pytradfri library to be super easy to use out of the box. It was easier to get information about the status of the gateway and the overall state of the world through this library than through the actual app. I don’t know if I would rely on it to do anything critical but it does seem like the kind of thing if you ever need to tinker with the stack it would let you do it.

Because the wireless protocol is Zigbee you don’t need the IKEA TRÅDFRI gateway, but I don’t have anything else that can serve in that control function and I wanted to connect the devices to Google Home. Be aware you can save a bit of money if you already own a Philips Hue stack. Also props to IKEA for including the USB cable for power, the wall outlet, and the Ethernet cable with the gateway. It’s a small thing but it is nice to not have to go into a box and dig up another Ethernet cable.

The stuff I didn't like

On the blinds themselves, it was hard to get the two to line up length. You have to hit the down button, then hold it and wait for it to get close to the next one and let go. If you miss the blind needs to roll back up to the top, you need to reset it by hitting one of the buttons twice to reset the length, then try again. It’s a small thing but it seems natural to me that you might have many blinds next to each other and would have loved a way to sync length between them. I also didn’t love how the battery pack that powers the blinds doesn’t seem to give me any feedback on its charging status. Once again IKEA has decided to go with one color LED here, another white LED. So I don’t know how charged the battery pack is. You let it charge for an hour, shrug and then plug it in.

In the smart home section, while I like the technical design of the gateway the app has some problems. First, the way you connect devices is super confusing at first. You take the up/down remote, reset it by unscrewing the back metal panel, then hitting a small button 4 times to reset it. You then take it over to the gateway, hold down the same button, wait for the app to say it has paired with the remote, then repeat with the signal repeater. Finally, you do the same thing with the blinds. This takes a LONG time. I couldn’t get it to pair with the signal repeater on the first 10 tries. Then I took a break, ate some dinner, came back and got it on the first try. It’s not clear to me why I need to use the remote to connect these devices and wish there was a less manual way to add stuff to the network. But, I suspect this might be a security thing since it requires me to get within 3 cm of the devices to pair.

Integrating it with Google Home, once everything was set up in the IKEA app, was super basic and worked great. Voice commands with Google Home worked on the first try and I didn’t encounter any surprises. Timers and other functionality in the IKEA app also worked. Since there is no internet functionality would appear to live on my local gateway which is great. But, I am a little worried about this stack.

Since everything is set up manually with me having to get quite close to each thing, I’m not sure how comfortable I am installing a lot of lights. There are reports online of people losing all their stored devices with software updates (which get applied to the gateway without any user intervention). I’m confident I could block it from hitting the update server (or doing something with DNS to trick the gateway to going to a local copy of the JSON file with the current firmware listed) but I’m not sure if that is a good idea since there isn’t a change log and I have no idea if there are critical security updates going out to the devices with these updates. Setting up three blinds again would be fine but setting up like 20+ devices with light bulbs and everything else is a multiple-hour job and since there is no backup to the internet I assume if the gateway dies or gets a bad software update I need to start from scratch.

Conclusion

I’m pretty pleased in general with these blinds. They work well with Google, they weren’t too bad to set up and I appreciate that IKEA has thought this product through to be defensively designed, which is refreshing in a world full of IoT devices that suck at security. The downside is that you are reliant on the physical gateway box that you purchased to continue working to keep your configurations and you are reliant on IKEA, who is not a software company, to keep all this running. I suspect a lot of the way they designed this product was with the assumption that if it proved to not be profitable it wouldn’t be dangerous for users to continue to run for years. I also appreciate that they used open standards and stacks without any ridiculous restrictions on access. If you have the gateway, you have the secret you need to make API calls.

The only thing I’m worried about is the lifespan of the blinds. Who knows if I’ll be able to buy replacement batteries in the future or where I will be able to find them. The lack of ability to wire these devices into power means I can’t imagine they have a lifespan beyond 5 years which is a bummer both for sustainability and also as a practical thing (I doubt the motor in there is only rated to work that long). But you can buy more of the battery packs (I didn’t see any inside of IKEA but they’re quite good about replacement parts so I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt here). I’m excited though to start expanding my smart home collection with a few light bulbs and a few outlets. Yet, I wouldn’t put anything critical on this technology yet. It seems like IKEA is on its way to figuring it out, but if you were relying on this to keep AC going for people with medical conditions or other more niche use cases I would keep looking. The software isn’t quite there yet. For normal home use though it should be fine.

What Do Beard Trimmers Teach Us About Modern Product Design

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Cords vs Cordless

If you have a beard, you need to trim it. Like so many products in modern life, this is something that seems simple. You'll need a device that lets you select how much to trim off and it will need to be relatively easy to operate. You probably won't use it on a daily basis but a few times a week you will pull it out. This should be a product that is painfully simple to buy. If everything we think we know about mass manufacturing holds true, this should be something where I walk in, get what I need and leave.

So why have I owned so many of the things? I've owned this one and I've tried that one. These are good brands (or at least I thought) with reasonable features that seemed to meet every need I could imagine. They have lots of high reviews and the price seems right in line with what I would expect to pay for a small motor with guides. But I kept running into problems.

These devices just never seemed to work that well. Mostly the battery simply didn't last long enough to get the job done. So I did what anyone does. First I started by taking my Remington beard trimmer apart. How they work is pretty simple. The cam of a DC motor is inserted into the middle of the cutter assembly and makes a motion which then allows the blades to move back and forth. There are two blades in the cutter, one which doesn't move and another that does. All of this is powered by a pretty normal looking DC motor that (according to google) is rated to move around 6,000 RPM. All of these are pretty common pieces.

With the razor apart I focused on the PCB components and the battery. As far as I could tell, all the PCB was doing is regulating the power supply to the motor and charges the battery (along with controlling the LED that shows whether the thing is charging or not). The power supply in this case was a rechargeable AA battery. According to Google this battery takes 14-16 hours to fully charge and should run a motor like mine for 20-30 minutes.

This, to me, is the problem with these beard trimmers. Nothing about this list of features is wrong except it is asking me, as the consumer, to make peace with all sorts of crazy compromises. 14-16 hour charge time? That's not portable! I was thinking of this device like I would a laptop or a phone, but of course it isn't. I need to plan ahead in order to trim my beard. So either I leave the trimmer sitting on my counter all the time (that looks super nice, right?) or I plan ahead. I guess I should be putting reminders in my calendar for the night before.

The other issue is the run time. I don't think 20-30 minutes of running on a single charge works. It's clear this battery isn't powerful enough to keep this device running for years. In fact, everything about this trimmer is designed to have a very finite lifespan for absolutely no reason. This battery at its peak can trim my beard twice with a charge after a night of charging. The performance will, of course, decrease as cycles increases on the battery. But the motor is still working fine. The basic mechanics of how the blades work will continue to function with lubrication for thousands more hours than the battery will. I have two highly understood pieces of machinery held back on purpose by the limitation of the power supply.

Ok but what if we just ran off the battery when we needed to? This would meet all of our needs. As far as I can tell neither of these products do that. It's always running off of the battery even when plugged into the wall. This has left me multiple times with half a beard trimmed. It's not a simple problem but there are designs for power delivery that allow you to work off the battery when the power cord isn't connected and off the wall power when it is. This seems like such a common sense design that you would, of course want. Because I would argue the worst case scenario for a beard trimming is to be left in a half-complete state. I'd rather you not even try if I can't complete the operation.

So many modern products make me feel this way. A series of compromises that don't help me and seem to be exclusively designed in order to ensure that I gain as few benefits from the product as possible. They know the DC motor is the same DC motor that a more expensive trimmer uses. They know that if power was not an issue you would need to buy one of these trimmers in your life (short of accidental damage).

This isn't just a beard trimmer problem. My new phone doesn't have a headphone jack, ensuring I go out and buy bluetooth headphones with lifespans limited by the internal battery of those devices. My laptop doesn't have any ports I might need or a replaceable battery, ensuring I need to both buy new versions of the things I already have. In a world where we are increasingly seeing more and more signs that we must slow down the rate of consumption of natural resources, we are surrounded by products designed to have a finite end date.

So what did I end up doing for my trimmer? Well once I took it apart it turns out the problem was pretty simple. It has a 600mah battery. I swapped it for a 1900 mah battery (after taking the entire thing apart even though there was no reason to make it so complicated) and suddenly my device was working so much better. Now that the one restriction on the correct functionality of the device is removed suddenly this trimmer has at least another year of life in it.

You might ask then "What is the problem Mat?" You solved the problem. First, I solved the problem because I'm not afraid to take things apart. Nothing about this device is designed to be taken apart. The designers of this product might as well be screaming "Don't do it" with the way this device is put together. Second this feels like a "tech tax". We don't teach people how PCBs work or how to take things apart. I only know how to do this because of my personal hobbies. But people who, for economic reasons, can't afford to keep replacing these items with new ones every six months might not have that same information.

So I ended up replacing my trimmer with this one. It's a cheap unit that operates on most of the same principals we laid out before with the exception being that this one just pulls power from the wall. With a small amount of light machine oil this thing will last me for years and years with normal operation. I never need to think about whether its charged or what kind of battery it has in it. It isn't designed with the idea of "what is the bare minimum we need to ship as a product" but instead is a very simple to operate and maintain machine that does exactly what you want with a minimum amount of fuss.

I would argue we need fewer tools designed to fail and more items designed like this. It is certainly an older fashioned way to design products. It means fewer units sold year over year and will likely limit the potential future growth of your company. However we are coming up to a lot of hard decisions around the future of the human race in relationship to the consumption of natural resources and one of the things we need to start to do is design the items in our lives to operate for longer. There is no recycling program as effective as making something we never need to recycle (or need to recycle much less).