Anyone can use his or her wireless PDA for productive tasks, such as making airline reservations, checking the weather, or finding the nearest Starbucks. But what does the modern unplugged surfer do when there is nothing productive needing producing? I have the answer.

There was a time when people occupied their idle hours with such mundane activities as thinking, memorizing poetry, and reading great literature. Those days are gone. The modern, post-GameBoy slacker uses his or her wireless PDA to tap into a vast ocean of remote thumb-twiddling aids. Here are a few examples for your study during a future unplugged time-wasting adventure.

Humor can be a pleasant diversion. One site that bashfully calls itself "Humor on the Internet" (http://baetzler.de/humor/humor_en.html) is chockfull of stuff that could possibly be humorous. It's hard to tell, but such titles as "Converting Pi to Binary: Don't Do It!" sound promising.

Another classic humor publication that now fits in your palm is The Onion (http://mobile.theonion.com/), a cornucopia of small, untrue stories with bizarre headlines. My favorite: "God Answers Little Boy's Prayer. 'No!' says God." The Onion has been around a long time in paper form. The primary advantage of the wireless version is that there is nothing to throw away when you're finished with it.

Some things are weird rather than funny. If you're lucky, they're both weird and funny. The wireless-friendly site "Weird Science" (http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/) has hundreds of links to weird scientific things, many of them in color. One article exclaims, "Free Energy Devices: "Warning! Warning! Don't give money to people involved in free energy!" Now they tell us. Another promising title is "Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments." I haven't read it but I know you will. I suspect I'll read about these experiments in the newspaper. (Remember paper?)

Idle time is always a good opportunity for self-improvement, and what could be better than self-improvement without wires? You can while away many hours at the "HandyFacts" site (http://www.squeezenet.com/HandyFact/default.htm), which provides compressed information organized into dozens of finely grained categories. Take etiquette, for example.

"Should I pick up a dropped fork?"

"Let the waitperson pick it up. You might put your eye out."

HandyFacts occasionally speaks with a curiously insistent authority, as in this advice to home buyers: "Buy a house in a popular neighborhood. Even if the house is expensive." Possibly not all of the handy things on this site are actual facts. Caveat emptor.

Perhaps it's news that you hanker for. You can spin the electrons reading bland, boring news sites, such as CNN.com, at your desktop. Or you can escape the surly bonds of copper and check into news about wireless access, PDAs, and other things gadgety. The best place to do this is at Geek.Com's PDA Geek site (http://www.geek.com/pdageek/portable/). You'll read all about the latest portable devices that are faster, cheaper, and cooler than the obsolete hand brick for which you shelled out $700 last month.

A New Breed of Smart Aleck

Everyone loves a smart aleck, so it stands to reason that you'll want to hone your smart aleck skills wirelessly. The very nicely done "Atomica" site (http://www.gurunet.com/solutions_products_web.html) has as its slogan the phrase "Knowledge Is Power." No doubt it is. But knowledge is also, apparently, a very long, unwieldy URL. Once you've typed it perfectly, though, you'll stand on the edge of a vast storehouse of knowledge, whose depths you plumb by typing in questions. "What is the atomic weight of boron?" you ask. "The average mass of an atom of an element, usually expressed relative to the mass of carbon 12, which is assigned 12 atomic mass units." The knowledge is in there. The knowledge is power. But it apparently can't get out.

Bio-logs, or BLOGs, are all the rage among the IQ X generation. A BLOG, in case you've just come out of a year-long coma, is a Web site where one holds forth on one's own personal life in a public forum that anybody in the world can read. Why? That is a question for Atomica, my friend.

BLOGs reinforce the truth of A. J. Liebling's adage, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." Now everyone can own one, even though they possibly should not.

A case in point is a guy named Josh, who has decided that an ordinary BLOG is just not cool enough. I omit Josh's last name because he possibly has relatives that still value it. Josh's selflessly named "Club Josh" (http://www.clubjosh.com/pda/update/) site is a step above ordinary BLOG coolness (I realize this is not saying much) by being both wireless and pointless. The above URL takes you to Josh's Daily Update. On the day I am writing this column (July 17, 2002), Josh notes: "Sunday was spent napping and recovering from the late night on Saturday." There are other comments for this entry, but none as exciting as this.

To sum up, let me quote another A. J. Liebling saying (courtesy of Atomica):

"Henry Miller may write about revelers self-woven into a human hooked rug, because his ecstasy is solemn."

Precisely.

Mel Beckman is a tech editor for e-Pro Magazine. You can e-mail him at mbeckman@e-ProMag.com.