Charge it
If Qian Jiang and Yiying Wu have their way, you can throw your old battery charger out the window and still keep your juice carriers at full strength. The two designers have come up with the IF-battery, a rechargeable current reservoir that you can connect directly to your wall socket. Two pins tucked into the side of the battery fold out when the juice is low and plug straight into the mains socket for a totally portable charging solution. The only downside is that you can only charge one battery at a time – unless, of course, you have a house of free sockets and not all that many electric gee-gaws. The design actually looks quite foxy – check it out at www.yankodesign.com – but couldn’t they have come up with a male connection on one side of the battery and a female on the other so that you can stack batteries and charge more than one at a time?

Speed it
Think Survivor for graphic designers. In Cut&Paste’s speed design competitions, eight competitors for the 2D version and four for each of the 3D and the Motion Design competitions in each of 16 cities around the world will be chosen after an intense process of elimination rounds and interviews for all entrants. These hot heads will work super fast using Photoshop and Illustrator through more rounds until in each city a champion emerges. Those 16 design gurus from around the world will then go head-to-head until, finally, the design grand champion crown finds its rightful topknot. Watch the Hong Kong contestants in action on May 15 from 7pm until midnight – check out http://cutandpaste.com/tours/program/formats for more information. Tickets are available at HK Ticketing 31 288 288.

Face it
Swine flu is all over the news and although Hong Kong thankfully is relatively free, facemasks have been popping up everywhere. Most are neither the most fashionable accessory nor comfortable to wear, but American designer Cheap Champagne have come up with a few ideas for facemask fashion. Try the denim one for a more casual look, a glitzy mask in gold for a night out or a bridal version in delicate lace and gold ear fasteners, if you are planning a trip down the aisle. The frenzy may all be a response to media hype and we hope swine flu never takes hold here but that doesn’t mean we can’t keep the Cheap Champagne product in mind for the more usual and innocuous strain of the disease. Get it at www.etsy.com

Race it
For those who don’t have the opportunity to get involved in real dragon boat races, Hasbro is coming out with the Ni Hao Kai-Lan Dragon Boat Race Game. It probably won’t generate the same kind of excitement as the real thing, but it’s a great way to involve the kids in the dragon boat delirium. Kai-Lan is a bicultural cartoon character from Nickelodeon’s Ni Hao, Kai-Lan game in which the Chinese-American preschooler is set to race against her friends Tolee, the panda-loving koala, and Rintoo, the tiger. Whoever wins three races gets to wear the dragon mask – but the best part is that no one gets wet! Purchase it at www.boardgames.com/nihaokadrbor.html or www.entertainmentearth.com/prodinfo.asp?number=HG04295

Count it
This one is for pedants and stats nuts – have you ever wondered how many drinks go down your throat in a week? Or the average time you spend on your iPhone? Go on, tell us how much time this month you’ve spent trawling the internet. You can record and work out all such life-defining numbers with a free account at daytum.com, a site that keeps track of all your daily statistics. Get a friend or two on the site and you’ll be able to keep an eye on what they do with their lives as well. An account on the site is free, though daytum does offer more features for a nominal US$5 a month. Check it out at daytum.com

Hear it
Skullcandy have launched a new set of headphones designed by Snoop Dogg and, according to the designer, they are ‘the hottest headphones comin’ to a hood near you. I’ve been a fan of Skullcandy products for years and I decided it was time to break bread with them. Our headphones are fly, affordable, and most importantly – bangin’ like Niggaracci beats.’ We wonder how much Skullcandy paid him to drawl all that but if you want to see if it is true, you’ll need to be in quick – the 200 pairs on sale in Hong Kong will retail for $799 after their release on May 30 in HMV stores.