Aggregating multiple RSS feeds into another RSS feed

I am a big fan of Flipboard the best free application to read news on iOS and Android. I am also a big fan of Freshnews.org which I read every morning to get my daily pulse of the tech universe. Unfortunately the two of them do not work well because Freshnews.org does not provide a useful RSS feed and just provides the most clicked feed.

So I had to build my own and for that I simply used the free RSSMix, you basically provide a list of URLs of the feeds you want to aggregate and it provides you a url of the resulting mix.

For example for freshnews.org I collected all the following feeds:

http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot/to
http://feeds.feedburner.com/cnet/NnTv
http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/recent/
http://www.reddit.com/.rss
http://www.gizmodo.com/index.xml
http://freecode.com/?format=atom
http://mobile.engadget.com/rss.xml
http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/tech
http://www.techdirt.com/techdirt_rss.xml
http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/everything
http://www.theregister.co.uk/headlines.atom
http://www.theinquirer.net/feeds/rss/type/news
http://www.amazon.com/gp/rss/movers-and-shakers/electronics/ref=zg_bsms_electronics_rsslink
http://feeds.feedburner.com/thenextweb
http://gigaomnetwork.com/feed/
http://www.osnews.com/files/recent.xml
http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
http://www.techmeme.com/index.xml
http://www.digitaltrends.com/feed/
http://feeds.gawker.com/lifehacker/full
http://techcrunch.com/feed/
http://feedproxy.google.com/CrunchGear
http://feeds.feedburner.com/neowin-main
http://feeds.gawker.com/io9/full
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AskMetafilter
http://feeds.wired.com/wired/index
http://www.tuaw.com/rss.xml
http://www.tomshardware.com/feeds/rss2/tom-s-hardware-us,18-1.xml
http://feeds.macrumors.com/MacRumors-All

I entered all of them into RSSMix with a simple copy and paste. RSSMix produced a useable url (http://www.rssmix.com/u/3627315/rss.xml) that I manually entered into Flipboard and everything worked!

Copying files from your computer to BlueStacks

BlueStacks is a fantastic piece of software allowing you to run Android applications on Windows and Mac, however it does not give you full access to its storage making it cumbersome to copy files the simple way you are used to with any Android device USB-style.

There are a lot of options involving mounting the obfuscated file system, however the guys are BlueStacks are constantly changing the storage method, so I looked and found a simple and neat solution fully contained in the Android emulation.

  1. On the main BlueStacks screen, click “App Stores” and launch the preinstalled Amazon app store
  2. In the search box enter “Ghost Commander” without quotes.
  3. Install Ghost Commander first, then the Samba plugin
  4. Run Ghost Commander, enter the local ip of your sharing machine, the directory you are sharing and you should be able to copy files back and forth as needed