There comes a time in each person’s life when it is time to change the wallpaper. And the drapes, but we’ll focus on wallpaper here. And by wallpaper I mean the picture on your computer screen that is normally covered by icons and open windows. I came across a few neat individual wallpapers, as well as some good sources, and thought you’d like to see them. Since these wallpapers are from sites run by the artists who designed the wallpapers, it is appropriate that you go to those sites to get them, so here I’ll just show a few thumbnails but mainly talk about topics and themes. You’ll need to click through to see the true quality of these pictures, and to obtain them.

Most of these are science or nature themes or themes that would be of interest to geeky people like you, and thus the first one I’d like to mention is YourFather (see photo).

YourFather Wallpaper is available here

How-To Geek has a number of sets of wallpapers that caught my eye, including:

• Ocean Waves (totally tubular) here.
• Rain Forests here.
• World Maps, including some historical ones, here/
• Ancient Mayan Ruins here/
• Auroras here.
• Coral Reefs here.

Two great sources of wallpapers generally, including lost of science and nature stuff, are National Geographic (such as the 2011 best of collection or the space and science collection) and Flickr. National Geographic has mostly nature and science themed, while for Flickr you’ll need to select the right search terms. If you enter words like “space” and “science” you get mostly institutions and buildings related to these topics, which at first seems kind of lame, but then you think, “hey, this is obscure and will thus be very geekily impressive under the right conditions”.

The geekiest wallpaper on the internet might be here at alphacoders. You may not even be able to stand it.

Google Image is your friend. Search terms like “best steampunk wallpaper” and “best laboratory glassware wallpaper” will produce results.

And speaking of Steampunk, check here, here, and here as well.

And finally, NASA has wallpaper.