Friday, October 24, 2025

Ibanez Wizard profile history

Since I’m on the market for a “battle” RG guitar to play with bands, I reminded a change that happened to the fretboard width of Wizard necks, from 56 to 58mm. According to Rich, it happened back in 2005.

Digging a bit more, I found more information about the Wizard neck profile history, which I compiled in the table below:

Neck Width Thick Radius
Original Wizard 43/57mm 17/20mm 17"
Pre-2005
Super Wizard 43/56mm 17/19mm 17"
Wizard 43/56mm 18/20mm 17"
Post-2005
Super Wizard 43/58mm 17/19mm 17"
Wizard 43/58mm 18/20mm 17"

Monday, October 20, 2025

Using VSCode for C++ projects

For a long time I thought I only could use Visual Studio to write C++ programs on Windows, because MSVC toolchain requires some particular initializations before being able to run.

Turns out there is a way to smoothly run all the MSVC machinery from within VSCode. The answer is the same I found last year in automating MSVC builds: we need a .bat file to call MSVC’s own .bat, then we invoke VSCode executable right after.

call "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Enterprise\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvars64.bat"
"C:\apps-portable\VS Code\Code.exe"

Save this .bat somewhere, and put a shortcut to it in your start menu, naming it “VSCode MSVC” or something like that.

To my surprise, some things work better in VSCode than in Visual Studio itself:

  • file navigation;
  • file creation and deletion;
  • error reporting – VSCode reports all files with errors, while in Visual Studio I have to build the project and look at the output to see which files are broken.

Monday, October 13, 2025

Perfect non-locking string winding

While searching my future Ibanez RG Prestige, I found this StewMac video of how to properly wind the strings around the tuning machines:

I remember having seen this technique before, but this time I’m keeping the reference.