Removing featured posts and recent post duplicates

I’ve enabled both featured posts as well as blog posts to show up in the home-page. I now see a few posts repeated twice in both the areas.

How to eliminate those duplicate posts that show up in the blog posts? I found this, but I have no idea how to proceed further. Could you please help me in this? 🙂 I’d also love to have the featured posts displayed based on more categories and tags, rather than a single category. Can you help on this too? 🙂