/dev/input/uinput Device appears to be 'broken'

"You are not supposed to read from uinput, as uinput is for creating user space devices and sending events to them, so the No such device message is normal.

I assume that it was either a simple permissions problem or a change in the location of the uinput device itself (i.e. /dev/uinput was expected but it was in /dev/input/uinput), both of which have changed in Ubuntu a while back, so that programs that expected old behavior might have gotten confused."