Over the next week we’ll be bringing you ten of the most desirable geek possessions. Some are as cheap as a few bucks, some cost tens of thousands of dollars, and some are one-offs which aren’t for sale. But every one of them should have you thinking “I want one of those!”

• Gyroscopic pool table

As anyone who’s played in a run-down bar with a ramshackle bar will know, a pool table needs to be flat. Really flat. A variation as minute as thousandths of an inch across a table’s surface can cause problems. When you’re on a boat, that type of slope is almost inevitable in anything but the calmest of waters.

This table uses a gyroscope to automatically adjust the table to remain level, no matter how the boat sways:

If you can’t afford one of these tables or if you don’t have your own ship, you can play on them if you are ever lucky enough to take a cruise with Royal Caribbean which has them on several of its liners.

• Cray CX1

At a starting price of $25,000 this is the world’s most expensive desktop computer. That’s largely because it’s a true super-computer with the ability to run 16 processors. At full capacity it can run 512 GB of RAM (that’s GB, not MB) and store 4,000 GB of data.

The main selling point is its small size: 31 x 44 x 90 cm, and weighing 62kg. That may sound heavy, but the first Cray supercomputer weighed 5.5 tons.

As you might imagine, this isn’t designed for your average home user (though 512GB might even be enough to run Vista). It’s primarily for researchers who need to process huge amounts of data but don’t have the space for larger machines. The first machine sold to UCLA for use in a neurological imaging lab.