30" here too, I'm sort of ashamed to tell you the point size of my fonts, but it works out to 141x42, screen about 2' away. I sent out a tweet about your project, hope it will get you some signups.
I'm terribly old-fashioned and use vim for development. My monolithic window is iTerm2 which allows for split panes. It is pretty nice with my laptop screen below for reference material.
I ended up spending an embarrassing amount of time on the post processing because I didn't spend enough time on setup ahead of time :)
I used https://github.com/nwinter/telepath-logger to take screenshots. I meant to have it take a screenshot of my top monitor only, and do anything sensitive on my laptop screen, but I didn't configure it correctly, and wound up with screenshots of my active window only, so I had to do some censoring, e.g. when I needed to edit our keys file, or when I blurred out the screenshot when I had to do some customer support.
You probably wouldn't want to even click the TMZ link in the first place when you knew you were making the video, since the post-production is so onerous. It's like a precommitment that you're not going to get distracted. In fact, when I did my maniac week, I precommitted to not doing any post-processing, and it helped me focus a lot. I would think, "hmm, I wonder what the strongest dog is!" but then realize I couldn't slack off on video, so I wouldn't even Google it like normal.
This was a ton of fun and I'd love to do it, or a modified shorter version of it again. It's hard to shut down the rest of my life for an entire week, but maybe a long weekend. Or I could do a week where the computer is taking screenshots 9-5 and I pre-commit to post the video as soon as it is over.
I think you can still commit to one change per day, whether or not you deploy them in batches. It'd be exciting to see the growing list of stuff to look forward to, rather than wait in a void of information. Better for the team building it too. You could note in your changelog which ones are live and which are being alpha tested.
Even if you personally don't need the commitment device because you never get discouraged and always do what you say you will do, I'm pretty sure that the signaling value of this to users is immense. Startups die a lot and it is super discouraging as a user when your new favorite thing goes away. Promise them you won't go away.
Slightly more seriously: for us, the premium plans are directed more to the hardcore users who are already committed and love the service, so more choice is maybe less daunting?
You actually have to have entered data on Beeminder in the last month to be considered active. If you haven't, we suppress the charge. So we just do that check every time before charging. Simply logging in isn't enough. And thanks everyone for the kind words about this!
If I understand correctly, you are marked active if data is sent in without logging in, say if you are replying to the emails or using Gmail Zero [0] or TagTime [1]. So logging in is neither necessary nor sufficicent to be considered active.
If automatic data entry is enough to be considered active, maybe you should warn people that the data points entered automatically will make them count as active.
Glad you pointed this out! We could add another check (though I'm sure it will almost always be moot) that you have to do something on Beeminder that only humans do to be considered active (either sign in or manually add data).
The more I think about it though, if you're not signing in at all then you'll almost surely derail before long, which means your graph will freeze and you won't be active any more, automatic data source or not.
In fact, it now occurs to me that this is an example of when it is fair to charge you for a month even if you weren't actively paying attention. It's like my example with SERPs.com in another reply here. If Beeminder is actively collecting data for you and storing it and graphing it then that's value that it's fair to pay for.
If you do entirely wander off then even with an automatic data source -- unless you set preposterously unambitious goals (don't do that!) -- you'll end up marked as inactive before long. So I think the spirit of auto-canceling is still being honored.
