---
title: Pleasures of a bus ride
date: 2026-08-19T17:54:02+08:00
categories:
    - interesting-experiences
---

There are some small pleasures in life, not worth mentioning by themselves, but sometimes they come together so well. Like:

- Google Pay popping up a "Disable verification for transit?" option, so I just touch my phone to the bus ticket reader even while on a call _and it just works like my card_.
- Finding a seat at the front of the double-decker bus on top, so I can take in the entire vista from a height for the entire one hour ride
- Discovering the ultra-configurable [Open Camera](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sourceforge.opencamera) app ([thanks to Thej](https://thejeshgn.com/2026/07/14/linked-list-annotating-photos-for-humans-and-machines/)) and capturing at the much smaller 640x480 resolution at 10x speed
- Transferring it like a breeze to my laptop with [LocalSend](https://localsend.org/)
- Compressing it into an ultra-small 1.4MB video thanks to the [AV1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1) codec and [FFmpeg](https://ffmpeg.org/)
- Publishing it to Cloudflare within a second thanks to ultra-fast WiFi

<video controls autoplay loop muted playsinline preload="metadata" width="480" height="640" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto;">
  <source src="https://media.s-anand.net/2026-08-19-pleasues-of-a-bus-ride.webm" type="video/webm">
  <a href="https://media.s-anand.net/2026-08-19-pleasues-of-a-bus-ride.webm">Watch the video</a>
</video>

Yeah... this is life!