qr-backup bounties

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+---
+author: admin
+categories:
+- Technical
+date: 2025-04-09
+tags:
+- qr-backup
+title: 'qr-backup bounties'
+---
+I am offering two bounties to improve qr-backup. I think both are worth doing regardless.
+
+My rewards are time-in-trade. You can use 5 or 10 hours of my time however you like. I usually charge over $100/hr, so this is a good deal.
+
+If the github bugs are open, the bounties are unclaimed. I will try to update this post when they are claimed, too.
+
+#### Bounty 1: Improve QR code scanning on Linux
+
+Chances are, there is exactly one command-line program your distro has available to scan QR codes: [zbar](https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/)
+
+Even on digitally-generated images, which are perfectly correct, pixel-aligned, and generally perfect, it still fails to read the codes sometimes. At least one-third of the bugs in the issue tracker are about this problem.
+
+The bounty is to fix this issue in zbar, getting it to read QR codes with a 0% failure rate. The current failure rate is at least 0.1%.
+
+A reproduction case and some debugging tips are [in the bounty details](https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/issues/306).
+
+The reward is 10 hours of my time.
+
+#### Bounty 2: Code a one-page C program to restore qr-backup backups
+
+qr-backup is designed to save to paper, and restore from the command-line.
+
+but, it's possible that someday we might lose all the nice infrastructure we have today. 
+
+- you want to restore your backup, but you're poor and don't have an internet connection
+- no one runs "unix" any more. we just have neural meshes
+- it's been 50 years and you can't figure out how to install all these programs no one has heard of like "zbar" and "qr-backup"
+- your country has become a totalitarian state, and you can't be seen downloading "archiving" programs.
+- you are a lizard-person who has recovered piles of paper from a previous civilization. what secrets could they hold?
+
+who knows! wouldn't it be great if you could **still** restore?
+
+this feature request is to add a printable, 1-page C program which you can type in by hand, compile, and use to restore backups from an image.
+
+---
+
+This is a very difficult technical challenge in minimization. You should provide a 1-page (2KB) version of qr-backup's restore process, written in C. Library use is not allowed. Arguments will be accepted for other short programs if 2KB is impossible.
+
+Details are [in the bounty description](https://github.com/za3k/qr-backup/issues/70).
+
+A short version of the steps:
+
+- **Read QR codes**
+- Sort them, remove duplicates
+- Base64 decode each code
+- **Erasure coding**
+- Append and truncate
+- **Decrypt**
+- **Decompress**
+- **Print SHA256 checksum**
+
+qr-backup actually prints a bash one-liner to do the restore, if you prefer to reference that.
+
+Each of the steps is done by qr-backup in the most standard way possible. Decompression calls `zcat`, for example. You should be able to re-use existing code easily, the challenge is just to shrink it.
+
+The reward is 5 hours of my time and everlasting fame.