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About Me

Welcome!

This site shares about my life and work. Most of what I do is devoted to practical solutions to avoid a global climate crisis. Acting from a point of compassion for all living things (or at least trying to!), I'm always ready to be challenged on how to maximize impact. Passionate about developing "whatever is missing" I'm building towards a sustainable future for all.

My Time

1. Open Access to Renewable Energies

Since 2012 I've been working with Solar Fire toward initiating a global wave of solar enterpreneurship.

2. Practical Tools for Change

Building web-platforms and systems with purpose that connect actors, empower people and facilitate change.

Urs Riggenbach

Selection of speaking engagements on camera or in front of impact-motivated crowds.

Idea, comment, interested to collaborate?

Contact Urs Riggenbach:
info@ursrig.com, 079 918 0663


Idee, Kommentar, interesse an Zusammenarbeit?

Bitte kontaktieren Sie mich:
Urs Riggenbach, info@ursrig.com, 079 918 0663

Presenting Lytefire - Swiss Alps

Presenting GoSol.solar - Finland

Presenting GoSol.solar - 2000 W Verein Solothurn

Freestyle Improv Acapella - Impact Hub Zurich

 

Urs Riggenbach

As Entrepreneur I support and enjoy building and growing businesses
from the ground up.

I get involved in things that make sense to me, have impact or bring learning and creation with it.

Lytefire / Solar Fire Concentration Ltd
CEO, Board Director & Co-Founder

June 2012 - now
Solar thermal technology solutions in the humanitarian and industrial sector.
 Technological development, project management, IT consulting, web and communication.

GoSol.solar
CEO, Board Director & Co-Founder

June 2012 - now
Launch of innovative platform for the spread of solar thermal energy solutions.

Autodesk Inc, San Francisco
Pier 9 Impact Residency

February 2017 - May 2017
 Industrial CNC machine training (Waterjet, Lasercuting, 5 axis CNC)
 Rapid prototyping using state of the art CNC machinery

vonsalis communications
Lead Developer

2014 - 2022
Development of custom web-platforms for the Zurich-based environmental communications agency.

UrsRig Consulting
Founder and CEO

2014 - now
Creation of web-development agency of impact and sustainability projects and beyond.

WWF Switzerland
Swiss Civil Service

February 2013 - July 2013
 Development of exhibition on renewable energies.

Oekozentrum Langenbruck, Switzerland
Swiss Civil Service

August 2013 - February 2014
 Support in research and development.

Sustainable Design/Build, Yestermorrow, USA
Semester course in sustainable design and building practices

 Instructors from the fields of architecture, construction and joinery/Carpentry
 Application of principles of sustainability and sustainable design in the architecture of a "tiny house" of 227 square feet.
 Project planning and management with different build milestones.
 Construction of entire tiny house, see it in New York Post "Tiny House 227".
 Study and implementation of HVAC systems.

College of the Atlantic, USA
Bachelor of Arts in Human Ecology

September 2008 - June 2012
 Relevant Coursework: Agroecology, Economic Development, International Water Resource Management, Physics II, Collaborative Leadership, Fieldwork: Seminar in Community-based Research, Documentary Film Making, Webdesign, Fixing Food Systems, Sustainability, Local Production - Global Collaboration.
 Senior project in Nepal installing renewable energy framework at rural school
 Spanish proficiency during project-stay in Yucatán, Mexico
 Davis UWC Scholar: full scholarship awarded

United World College, India
International Baccalaureate, IB

September 2006 - May 2008
 International Baccelaurate (IB) with major biology and economics.
 Course language English.
 Extended essay: Sugarcane Cultivation in the Mulshi Valley, India.
 Full Scholarship from the Swiss Association for UWC

Born

1990

Urs Riggenbach

As Developer I build scalable, secure and performing solutions in Apps,
on the Web and on the Cloud.

I work in a network of curated developers, designers and content creators, so each project happens in a project-specific team. For the Canton of Bern I built the interactive App "Biz-Links" that helps people find the right career. As a progressive web app it is simultaneously avaiable on Android and iOS devices, as well as directly reachable in the browser by link. My full portfolio is further below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Portfolio

Selection of projects in the fields of web-development, internet security, Android-app development, webstores, crowdfunding and campaign sites, online community platforms and financial modeling. Most projects are based on a security and scalability optimized tech-stack based on open-source SPIP, LXC and GNU/Linux.

Project idea and need a tech-team? Let's talk!

Clients & Users

Projects

Urs Riggenbach

I like creating content and sharing ideas. My blog contains notes across topics that may be helpful to others.

Part 2: Importance of Self-Love

Posted Sunday 15 November 2020 by Urs Riggenbach.

This is post is part of a series of posts of creative writing.

 

How much do you criticize yourself, and for what? Let’s imagine something. You trip over some steps, and immediately you tell yourself “Look at you, you’re so clumsy, such a mess, always falling over stuff!”

Unfortunately, we often react like this when small or big things are not working out in life: We judge ourselves immediately and harshly so. But wasn’t it already bad enough to fall, why doubling down with these hurtful thoughts?

Of course analyzing ourselves and being critical at times is healthy and a great way to drive self-improvement. But there has to be a balance and many of these thoughts, especially the immediate and harsh ones do not serve that balance.

Many thoughts we have are thought patterns we have accumulated and trained over the years. Things like worrying, criticizing, self-loathing, stress; thinking processes that result in bad emotions. There are others, like love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness; these result in a lot better emotions.

There is a lot of value in noticing these thought patterns, to understand how much time we spend in each of them. You may notice unbalancedness in people who spend most of their time in one thought patterns, for example being super worried, or critical or untrusting or stressed, basically all the time. It is almost as if this person is somehow addicted to a thought pattern.

If we start paying attention to which thought patterns we’re in, for how much time and how they make us feel, we may uncover times when we apply thought patterns that make us feel bad for no good reason. For example, there are good reasons to feel stressed, but we often remain longer than necessary in the stress mindset than needed, even after the job is done or the situation is over. After a week of high-stress working we may continue to work recklessly, sleep equally bad and rush from thing to thing. Our mind has gotten used to applying the stress mindset over the past days and is now continuing to do so. In this way, we get used to (or addicted to, or stuck in) the thought patterns we apply, and the more we apply them, the more our mind will re-apply them in the next situation.

But there are deeper, more specific thought patterns that may live in us. We may have accumulated them from our guardians, teachers and other figures of authority.
For example, if you have been judged heavily on your dress code as a child, you may still do this today. If you have been pushed to reach for excellence you may still do this in many aspects of your life today. This is just to show that thought patterns may not necessarily be your own but come from conditioning. By noticing them and inspecting them it becomes apparent if it is a pattern you have developed or aspired to yourself, or if it has been forced on you.

No matter where it comes from, a thought pattern knows no limit by itself. In fact, thought patterns are pretty much the opposite of self-regulating: The more you listen one, the more it will appear. So it’s your responsibility to watch them, understand where they come from, and sometimes, stop them.

By stopping a thought pattern that you have identified as not helpful, you reverse this trend, by dismissing the thought you spend less time it in, and thus reducing your mind’s tendency to spend time in it.

It starts as simply as noticing the thought and saying “oh, I’m having this thought again”. Now you are focusing on your emotions, on what you want to think about it and most importantly this creates a differentiation between your thoughts and yourself. This is very powerful. Instead of being your thoughts, you have thoughts. And it is up to you to pay attention to them.

You can also start by thinking about yourself, the things you do and think, and wondering where they come from. This too can help you identify hurtful through patterns, and once you’ve identified them you may more easily spot them in your daily life and dismiss them.

Disclaimer: This is the first time I’m expressing myself on this topic. I’m trying to express some realizations I had that have helped me tremendously to be less shy, more compassionate and stable/stronger. It’s a collection from many teachings I have had the pleasure to observe, and I am happy to provide sources or pointers where needed. Most importantly I am trying to figure out if there is an interest for this kind of content as I would love to carve out more time for this type of writing.


Creative Writing Part 1: Overview

Posted Sunday 15 November 2020 by Urs Riggenbach.

This is post is part of a series of posts of creative writing done in the winter days of 2020.

 

"Much suffering is in vain and could be avoided with a dose of self-love, non violent communication and the deflection of manipulation. " - an introductory statement to the series of creative writing posts.


Decrypting Formatted LUKS Partitions

Posted Friday 14 February 2020 by Urs Riggenbach.

Linux allows for block level filesystem encryption, via LUKS and the cryptsetup utility. When installing Linux, disk encryption is a recommended option as it ups your data security and protection. When encrypting external drives, the drives are unreadable on Mac and Windows computers, which will then ask you if you want to format the drives. If you’ve formatted a drive by accident, do not panic, just make sure you don’t write any new data to the drive and use below steps to get your data back.

 
1. Search hard-drive for LUKS (missing) partition.
Substitute sdc with your hard-drive, use for example gnome-disks to identify the hard-drive path):

hexdump -C /dev/{sdc} | grep LUKS

This will output something like:

hexdump -C /dev/{sdc} | grep LUKS
2e3b5040  65 73 73 20 64 65 6e 69  65 64 00 4c 55 4b 53 ba  |ess denied.LUKS.|
{{2f500000}}  4c 55 4b 53 ba be 00 01  61 65 73 00 00 00 00 00  |LUKS....aes.....|

→ If you have multiple encrypted partitions on the drive, you will get more outputs. If you just have 1 partition, you can cancel the command once you have reached the first outputs.

 
2. Loopmount the found partition.
Add "0x" to the location descriptor (for example: 2f500000) outputted by GREP in previous step.

losetup -o 0x{{2f500000}} -r -f /dev/{sdc}

 
3. Decrypt the found partition.
With the following command, it will be mounted at /dev/mapper/decrypted_partition. You will be asked for your password.

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/loop0 decrypted_partition

 
4. Access the decrypted partition
For regular partitions, such as ext4, btrfs, etc, you should now see the partition in your favorite file browser, or using gnome-disks software.

If the partition contains an LVM, run:

vgchange -ay

 

And then check your file browser or gnome-disks software for your hard-drive. De-panic and backup your data to another disk.