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"

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.

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.

Single target dir for all Rust projects

Rust, just like C++, generates a lot of output files when you build an executable. Particularly, when writing my programs with WinSafe, I use the library straight from a sibling directory, so I can test any changes right away – the side effect is that all those output artifacts are generated repeatedly for each new program.

So I’ve just tested the target-dir global option for Cargo, which will use a single target directory for all projects. This would, in theory, prevent the constant rebuilding of WinSafe artifacts.

Since the output dir changed, I had to also change the deploy.sh scripts to point to the new location. Other than that, everything seemed to work as intended, and I’m pretty satisfied with the results.

This is now my global ~/.cargo/config.toml file:

# https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/3381#issuecomment-710388554
[net]
git-fetch-with-cli = true

# https://redd.it/1dua24f
# https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/11/09/parallel-rustc.html
[build]
target-dir = "D:\\Stuff\\Core\\rs\\_target"
#rustflags = ["-Z", "threads=8"]
# Change default toolchain:
# rustup show
# rustup default nightly-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc
# rustup default stable-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc

As an extra benefit, when I want to clean the target directory, now I just need to delete the single _target one.

Previewing Go package documentation

While developing Windigo, I’m using the auto-generated docs at pkg.go.dev. It’s not perfect, but it’s something.

I didn’t know, however, a way to preview the generated docs while still developing the library.

Go 1.25 brought a new go doc option which allows us to preview the documentation by creating a temporary, virtual server. It downloads a whole bunch of packages, builds them, and then effectively displays the current docs:

go doc -http

This is being a game changer, I can now preview all the documentation instantly. Thanks to this guy who told me that.

Install PKCS#11 drivers, Linux

I need the PKCS#11 USB token at work, and every time I spin a new Linux VM, I need to install it again. But I never remember what needs to be done. So I’m documenting the steps here.

First, download the latest driver at GlobalSign, unzip and install it. The installation will probably fail because of missing dependencies; the second command will install them followed by the original package:

sudo dpkg -i foo.deb
sudo apt-get -f install

Once you reboot, the SafeNet icon will appear in the tray.

To install support for Brave browser, see here.

Brave cookies whitelist

I’ve been wasting way too much time, multiple times, looking for Brave’s cookie whitelist setting. So I’ll just leave it here, for reference to my future self. I found the reference on this Reddit post.

The settings are buried in:

• Settings
• Privacy and security
• Site and Shields Settings
• Content
• Additional content settings
• On-device site data
• Customized behaviors

Or, this direct link:

brave://settings/content/siteData