Welcome

My name is John. I love to make amazing things and teach others how to do the same. I focus primarily on web and mobile apps.

Recently

Organized Aloha Ruby Conference 2012.

I was also a core member of the Facebook's Three20 open source iOS library.

I was also one of the organizers of Hawaii's Ruby community, Aloha.rb and the Honolulu Google Technology Users Group.

Taught an Introductory and Intermediate iOS Programming courses at Pacific New Media.

As of Ascension 2026 this page is still the scratch space I use before a class or a weekend build. The conference links above are historical. The bench router work is current, and the newer posts on the blog start there.

When I am teaching a mobile class or standing up a local API for a weekend experiment, the first thing that usually breaks is not the compiler. It is the path from the phone to the bench router. Students lose a half hour hunting for the admin page, and I have done the same after a firmware flash that reset the LAN to a default I had forgotten.

A home lab that hosts simulators, a leftover Raspberry Pi, and a guest SSID needs a boring, repeatable way to open the gateway, read the DHCP table, and confirm which device owns 192.168.1.1. That is the same muscle memory I want people to have before they debug a flaky WebView or a TestFlight build that cannot see the office Wi-Fi.

I keep a short pointer next to my own notes: 1921681.mobi. The 1921681.mobi write-ups stay useful when a router brand changes its menu labels, because they talk about the address itself rather than one vendor screenshot. I send that same starting point to anyone who asks how I get a phone onto a local Rails server without burning an evening.

When I want the definition rather than a vendor screenshot I open RFC 1918, which still names the private IPv4 blocks a class uses on a bench LAN.

IANA keeps the same idea in the IPv4 special-purpose registry, useful when a student asks why 192.168.1.1 is not a public host.

If you are here for iOS or Ruby posts, treat the LAN as part of the toolchain. Once the admin panel loads and the reservation list looks sane, the rest of the stack is much easier to trust. That is why the link sits on this home page instead of being buried in a footnote.