If you’re a developer and use macOS Monterey, then you may have come into issues when using ports 5000 and 7000 on your local machine. And seeing as these are pretty common ports, I can imagine that this will affect quite a few people.

It turns out, what’s using these ports is the new AirPlay Receiver functionality added in Monterey.

You can find this in the Sharing pane of System Preferences. And if you don’t care about having it enabled, then you can just uncheck it, and the ports will be free.

However, if you do want to make use of AirPlay Receiver, then all you need to do is first disable it, run your local server, and then enable AirPlay Receiver again. It will then use a different port.

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:

My new MacBook Air is proving to be all that I’d hoped, and it’s not just because of the fancy new M1 processors. Since I’m coming from a 2014 MacBook, I’m reaping the benefits of all the other advancements Apple has made to its laptop line in the intervening years, and prime among those is the incorporation of Touch ID: I’ve already enabled it for 1Password (what a lifesaver) and, thanks to a tip from Twitter follower Josef, I can bring it to one of my other favorite places: the command line.

Such a great tip. I wonder why it’s not more easily available?

Shihab Mehboob (@JPEGuin) shared a useful tip on Twitter, where you can expand the amount of rows and columns in Launchpad.

Turns out you can do this by altering the following values via Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-rows -int 8
defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-columns -int 8

For these changes to have effect, you’ll need to restart the Dock. You can do this via Activity Monitor or by typing killall Dock.

Here’s what mine looks like on my 16″ MBP:

So much better than the massive icons that come by default.

I’ve just come across a rather helpful tip on Reddit, and it’s a simple key combination to toggle hidden files and folders in Finder.

It’s just:

CMD + SHIFT + .

It also works in the Open/Save dialog windows.

Via u/CompiledSanity on Reddit.